Asian Art Newspaper June/Summer Quarter 2021

ASIAN ART Summer Quarter 2021

The newspaper for collectors, dealers, museums and galleries • june 2005 • £5.00/ US$8/ €10

THE NEWSPAPER FOR COLLECTORS, DEALERS, MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES • £5.00/US$10/€10

CHINESE JADES TOP THE LOTS AT HONG KONG SALES

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n April at Sotheby’s Hong Kong, a Qianlong-period imperial inscribed seal made a world auction record for white jade and an imperial seal when it achieved over US$18 million in the Chinese Works of Art spring sale. A second seal, the only surviving Ming-dynasty imperial seal of imperial green jade, and a memorial seal of the Yongle Empress from the Hongxi period, also soared over its estimate of HK$25-35 million, to realise HK$43.43 million (US$5,595,521). The third jade, in the Monochrome III sale, was a zitanmounted imperial inscribed archaic jade bi from the Eastern Han dynasty (the stand dates to the gengyin year of the Qianlong period), which was sold for HK$53,771,000 (US$6,927,856), creating a world auction record for an archaic jade.

The white jade Qianlong seal is dated Qianlong bingxu (1766) and was personally used by the Qianlong Emperor. Carved with a dragon knop and incised on the base with the three characters Ji’entang (The Hall of Grace Remembrance) in seal script.

Its four sides are incised with the Qianlong Emperor’s essay Ji’entang ji (Memoirs of the Ji’entang) in its entirety. Importantly, records also show that the seal is mentioned in the Qianlong Baosou (Register of the Qianlong imperial seals) kept in the Beijing Palace Museum collection.

This shows that the seal was kept in the Ji’entang of the Louyue Kaiyun (Engraved Moon and Unfolding Clouds), one of the 40 views of the Yuanmingyuan (Summer Palace).

Typical of the type of treasures found in the Yuanmingyuan, it seems that it was a very precious and important seal to the Qianlong Emperor himself.

Its significance lies in the fact that it reflects the grandfather to grandson relationship that Emperor Qianlong enjoyed with his own grandfather, the Kangxi Emperor. This close relationship, and the consequent affections which developed, stayed with Qianlong throughout his life.

There are, in fact, two Ji’entang halls. One is in the Yuanmingyuan, and the other is in the Bishu Shanzhuang (Imperial Summer

An imperial inscribed white jade ‘Ji’entang’ seal, Qing dynasty, Qianlong period, dated to the bingxu year (corresponding to 1766), 10.4 x 10.4 x height 7.8 cm, from a Hong Kong Collection, sold at Sotheby’s for HK$145,691,000 (US$18,770,828), on 22 April, 2021

Palaces in Chengde). These halls are Qianlong’s expression of the affections, attachments, and benevolence his grandfather the Emperor Kangxi had showered on him as a child. The Ji’entang seal sold at Sotheby’s was kept in the Ji’entang hall of the Yuanmingyuan. Its pair, the Ji’entang seal from the Bishu Shanzhuang, is now kept in the collection of the Palace Museum,

Arts of India Auction Fine Art Auctioneers & Valuers

Tuesday 15 June, 1pm

Beijing. By following Qianlong’s imperial poetry and essays, the seal can be dated to the 31st year of Qianlong (1766).

According to palace convention relating to various imperial seals, all pieces recorded in the Baosou under the description of ‘white jade’ are made of lustrous, moist, and spotlessly white stone. But one can see that the material of this jade seal

NEWS IN BRIEF INDIAN MUSEUMS UNDER THREAT IN NEW DELHI

The programme called the ‘Central Vista Redevelopment Project,’ is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s bid to revamp a two-mile stretch of New Delhi’s Rajpath boulevard and erect a series of government structures, including a brand-new Parliament and residences for the prime minister and the vice-president. The plan is billed as a symbolic turning of the page on India’s colonial past – the boulevard, formerly known as Kingsway, was conceived by the British Imperial Government. However, the mammoth architectural undertaking will necessitate the demolition and relocation of iconic Indian institutions: the National Museum of India, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), and the National Archives Annexe.

Nearly 100 artists, academics, and museum professionals have now signed a statement calling for ‘an immediate halt’ of the Central Vista project, citing concerns ranging from the potential threat to cultural heritage and a lack of transparency around a rushed planning process.

JAMEEL PRIZE, LONDON A Mughal gem-set and enamelled tray, India, 18th century, of canted rectangular form Provenance: Private English Collection the estate of Hugh Meyer Sassoon (1929-2020) £1,000-£1,500*

Scan the QR code to view the auction catalogue www.roseberys.co.uk Email islamic@roseberys.co.uk for more information 70/76 Knights Hill, London SE27 0JD | +44 (0) 20 8761 2522 *Plus Buyer’s Premium +VAT (30% inclusive of VAT)

is not the same. Its colour is slightly green, some areas appear black, and the seal body is scattered with fine crackles. These are all evidence supporting the fact that this seal has experienced a fire, but that the extent of the damage caused by the fire is not too serious. Although the original colour of the jade has changed and minute crackles have appeared, fortunately the seal’s knop, body, and the inscription carved on the face have been preserved intact.

It is, in fact, a significant testament to palace history. This seal must have been kept in the Ji’entang of the Yuanmingyuan until the British and French armies sacked the palace in 1860. Unfortunately, not even the Ji’entang was able to escape the ravages and burning committed by the soldiers, and it is most likely that the damage on the seal as we see it today was caused by this event.

Representing the special relationship between a grandfather and a grandson and the effects of a turbulent past, the seal is considered of great historical significance.

The Jameel Prize’s theme this year is ‘Poetry to Politics’ and is devoted to contemporary design inspired by Islamic tradition. This is the sixth edition of the Jameel Prize and is the first time it has focussed on design alone. The exhibition presents the work of eight designers from India, Iran, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the UK.

The finalists’ diverse practices span graphic design and fashion, typography and textiles, installation and activism. Their work addresses the personal and the political, interpreting the past in creative and critical ways. Jameel Prize: Poetry to Politics reflects the ways in which Islamic art and culture remain rich sources of inspiration for contemporary design.

Over 400 entries were received from designers all over the world. An international jury selected eight finalists for the exhibition at the V&A, which will be on display from 18 September to 28 November 2021.

The finalists are Golnar Adili (b 1976, USA), an artist and designer based in New York.

Growing up in Tehran after the 1979 Revolution, Adili’s early life was characterised by separation and uprootedness. Her practice explores aspects of her identity through Persian language and poetry. Hadeyeh Badri (b 1988, UAE), makes textiles with a rich creative language. Her weavings incorporate Arabic writing into the dense and delicate fabric.

Kallol Datta (b 1982, India) is a clothing designer from Kolkata. Datta is interested in clothing practices from North Africa, West Asia, the Indian subcontinent and the Korean peninsula. Farah Fayyad (b 1990, Lebanon) is a graphic designer and printmaker. During popular uprisings in Lebanon in 2019, Fayyad and a group of friends installed a manual screen-printing press at the heart of the Beirut protests. They printed artworks and slogans by local designers onto the clothing of protestors, bringing Arabic typography into the public and political sphere. Ajlan Gharem (b 1985, Saudi Arabia) is an artist and mathematics teacher. His work explores the changing continued on page 2

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SHAHZIA SIKANDER

ASIAN ART Contact us The Asian Art Newspaper Vol 24 Issue 6 Published by Asian Art Newspaper Ltd, London

by Olivia Sand

Editor/publisher Sarah Callaghan The Asian Art Newspaper PO Box 22521, London W8 4GT, UK sarah.callaghan@ asianartnewspaper.com tel +44 (0)20 7229 6040

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ooking back at Shahzia Sikander’s career (b 1969, in Pakistan), which spans close to three decades, her practice has, over time, grown into a Gesamtkunstwerk: from her miniature works that propelled her to the forefront of the contemporary art world in the 1990s, to installation, video, glass mosaic, and lately sculpture, she has consistently created art with explore literature, poetry, dance, music, film, crafts, politics, history and sociology. As a result, Shahzia Sikander’s work recounts private stories and, on a more global scale, looks at contested issues around colonialism, migration, identity, gender, sexuality and race.

Committed to going beyond mere aesthetic qualities, she advocates an art that is part of a social discourse that engages with the important issues of our time. An outspoken and brilliant artist, she has played an active role in redefining the parameters of contemporary art and beyond in her native Pakistan.

Based in New York, she embraces new projects, constantly identifying additional ways how art can help connect or cross boundaries.

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Shahzia Sikander. Courtesy artist’s studio and Sean Kelly Gallery NY. Photo: Matin Maulawizada

Creating contemporary manuscripts in Lahore in the 1980s was a radical step

Asian Art Newspaper: You managed to reconcile two terms that used to stand at opposite sides of the spectrum: tradition and the avant-garde. How did you go about this?

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Shahzia Sikander: This idea of what is

traditional covers a broad representation and is worth some thought – and more specifically, who gets to define what is traditional and what is avant-garde? I tend to not think, in general, in binaries, but I am interested in how tradition is performed. Art history is deeply Eurocentric and tends to place art that does not sit comfortably within its canon often as ‘other’ and rarely as ‘avant-garde’.

The term avant-garde has often been reserved for art addressed from within the Western art history construct and criticism. For example, conceptually deconstructing pre-modern Central- and South-Asian manuscripts without abandoning the inherent techniques at a time when engaging craft-based traditions were not hip or cool. To create contemporary manuscripts in the 1980s in Lahore, Pakistan, was a radical step for me as a very young artist, when the regional status of miniature painting was mired in tourist kitsch. I would argue that my work The Scroll (1989-90) was avant-garde in that it broke open the mould for what could be considered a ‘contemporary miniature’.

However, I was seen as a traditional artist in the US when I was doing an MFA in the early 1990s, when neither historical nor contemporary miniature painting was familiar in the Western art-world. It was because my work was

Summer 2021

news in brief nature of society in Saudi Arabia.

Sofia Karim (b 1976, UK) is an architect, artist and activist. Her Turbine Bagh project was inspired by the 2019 protests in Shaheen Bagh, a neighbourhood in Delhi, against the Indian government’s Citizenship Amendment Act. Jana Traboulsi (b 1979, Lebanon) is an artist and graphic designer.

Stemming from research into Middle Eastern book-making traditions, Traboulsi’s Kitab alHawamish (Book of Margins), 2017, explores margins and marginalia in Arabic manuscript production. And finally, Bushra Waqas Khan (b 1986, Pakistan) was originally trained as a printmaker, but today designs and constructs intricate dresses at miniature scale. Her inspiration and source material is affidavit paper, which is decorated with national emblems and Islamic patterns, and used for all official documents in Pakistan.

LONDON BOOK FAIR GOES DIGITAL

This June, the annual London Book Fair is being hosted online as an interactive event throughout the month. Conferences are running between 7 and 10 June, and the digital event will then follow for two weeks from the 21 June. This will create an opportunity for a larger global audience to come together to do business, learn and share ideas.

USC PACIFIC ASIA MUSEUM OPENS

After being closed for more than a #AsianArtPaper |

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year because of the pandemic, the USC Pacific Asia Museum is preparing to reopen this month and just in time for a major milestone their 50th anniversary. The museum opened its doors during Memorial Day weekend, on 29 May during Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

sovereign ASIAN art prize, hong kong

The Sovereign Art Foundation (SAF) has announced the names of 30 mid-career artists shortlisted as finalists for The 2021 Sovereign Asian Art Prize, the 17th edition of the prize for contemporary artists.

Finalists in the running for this year’s prize come from 17 countries and regions across Asia-Pacific, of which Australia has the strongest representation with five artists shortlisted, followed by India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and South Korea with three artists each.

Amongst the finalists, 28 artists have been shortlisted for the first time. This year, the prize also achieved a record breaking 744 entries from 30 countries and regions in Asia-Pacific.

museum of chinese in the americas, new yorK

After the devastating fire at the Museum of the Americas in New York over a year ago, the museum has launched a digital platform with Google Arts & Culture, Trial by asianartnewspaper |

Fire: The Race to Save 200 Years of Chinese American History, to make hundreds of digitised images of their treasures available online while the physical building is under repair.

Fortunately, about 95 percent of the holdings had survived, despite some water damage. In the autumn of 2020, the museum discovered that they had been awarded a US$3.1 million grant as part of the Ford Foundation’s America’s Cultural Treasures initiative. The grant, received as a lump sum, has allowed the museum to upgrade its website and other technical projects, with the bulk of the grant going to support conservation of the objects.

The museum’s director, Nancy Yao Maasbach, is also seeking to establish a consortium of 28 other small Chinese American historical museums around the US, including the Chinese American Museum Los Angeles, the Chinese Historical Society of New England, and the Hawaii Chinese History Center.

istanbul biennial 2021 cancelled

The Istanbul Biennial has announced the postponement of the physical edition of its 17th edition, scheduled to open this September, to 2022, owing to a spike in Covid-19 cases in Turkey. The new dates for the biennial are 17 September to 20 November, 2022.

colomboscope

This year’s festival is still scheduled to open in August, with the theme ‘Language is Migrant’.

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People The artist Shahzia Sikander discusses the retrospective of her work currently in New York The photographer Russel Wong’s Kyoto works in Singapore, alongside a collection of ukiyo-e Madame Song and Maryn Varbanov, a love story

12 travel Touring Ladakh and early Buddhist rock art

features 14 Women Who Hunt, looking for the huntress in Indian miniatures 16 From the Archives: Emerald Cities, a journey through Southeast Asian art 18 Exhibitions in Taipei, New York, Adelaide, Dayton Ohio, Phoenix, London, Paris, Florence, Bern and Istanbul 21 Gallery shows in Paris, New York 22 Auction reviews from Hong Kong and London. Fairs in Paris and London 23 Islamic Arts Diary

next issue September 2021 No issues July, or August.

How to Contact Us, see page 2 asianartnewspaper.com

People 3

engaging pictorial traditions that did not sit in at the centre of Western art history that it got glossed over, called ‘traditional’ and straight-jacketed in terms of my biography. This brings me to the point I am making, that my work was seen through the lens of a Pakistani, a female, a Muslim female – an Asian first. Such opaque and broad projection emphasised the work as that of ‘the other’, an outsider, from another culture, robbing the work of any meaningful and critical read and, instead, being substituted for by the prevalent Western essentialist approach to the third world.

To counter this, I started deconstructing exclusionary ideas within race representations, rejecting the colonial and male gaze, and reimagining archetypal characters to tell much richer stories.

AAN: In your opinion, why did it take so long for miniature painting to be ‘rediscovered’, all the more so as miniature painting has the advantage of featuring a rich narrative, which is not the case, for example, in Chinese calligraphy?

SS: We need to consider the term

‘Miniature Painting’ first. It is important to first understand what we are referring to when we say ‘miniature’. A singular term cannot encompass a vast history of diverse pictorial languages across many eras and geographies. Miniature is a complex, even a problematic term, part of a European colonial legacy from as early as the 1600s, when European merchants and tradesmen and later European scholars when going to South Asia encountered local paintings and saw an analogous relationship to European miniatures. For sure, the term continues to be used, even though there are many scholars and artists that are making concerted effort to educate and use terms like manuscript painting instead. Broadly speaking, miniature painting refers to the pre-modern syncretic painting traditions of South and Central Asia: book arts, illuminated manuscripts, illustrated folios that sometimes accompanying literary epic poems, religious texts, court events. Within these examples there are many regional schools, styles, patronage, socio-political histories – such as Safavid, Sultanate, Pahari, Mughal, Sikh, Rajasthani, Deccani, Company, etc.

Also important is a little background on the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore. Miniature painting’s academic history was part of the colonial project linked to the English provenance of reviving Indian crafts. It is interesting to note that the school’s first principal was the British colonial officer John Lockwood Kipling, father of the author Rudyard Kipling. Western models of teaching art were prevalent there, and although the miniature had long been taught at the NCA, a major had only been established in 1982 by Professor Bashir Ahmad and it was not yet appreciated as a path for an ambitious artist. When I joined in 1987, there were barely any students majoring in it. When I took up the traditional practice of miniature painting in 1987, the medium was deeply unpopular among young artists and was put aside as derivative.

Miniature painting, with its unresolved national status and stigma, captured the paradox of culture and nationalism far more than any other discipline at NCA

in the shifting geopolitical landscape of the 1980s.

My interest in pre-modern manuscripts was sparked in response to a dismissive attitude, as well as my curiosity to learn about pictorial vernacular that was not from a Westernpainting canon. What got me deeply hooked was understanding how European colonial legacy shaped miniature painting’s fate, as many South-Asian manuscripts were dismembered and sold for profit. Many important historical paintings from Central and South Asia reside in collections at the British Museum, the V&A, The Met, the Royal Library and Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, and are not accessible for many students studying in Asia. It was a revelatory experience to see the real Padshahnama manuscript (1650s) in person recently, under a magnifying glass, luminous and sublime, after having studied its black and white photocopied versions as a student. Another iconic manuscript, the Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp (1524), illustrated by Firdausi, is a good case study of dispersion of non-Western historical art via colonial legacy.

I studied closely with Bashir Ahmed from 1987-1991 and in 1992, started teaching with him in the miniature department at the NCA, becoming the first female and his first student to teach there. Transforming miniature painting’s status from traditional and nostalgic to a contemporary idiom became my personal goal. I carried that burden as an MFA

student in the 1990s in the US, when the art form was not familiar in the contemporary international art world.

For more than three decades, I have examined the painting traditions of South and Central Asia by digging into archives in the Western museums. Mine has been an investigative pursuit highlighting the politics of provenance, ownership, and narration. I have learned that tradition is not static and the discourse benefits from fresh perspectives.

AAN: With regards to your practice, one often reads that you broke the boundaries of miniature painting. Can you elaborate on this in your own terms?

SS: My NCA thesis The Scroll (1989-90)

emerged as the tipping point, laying to rest the debate about miniature’s inability to engage the youth. It launched what is now called the Neo-Miniature movement. I studied with the miniature master painter Bashir Ahmed and although the thesis requirement then was to produce detailed miniature paintings the size of a notebook page, I made instead a singular five-foot miniature painting. The work created over a year and a half has intense detail, some of it done with a magnifying glass. It depicts various stages of youth, and the young female protagonist defies bodily restrictions by becoming an elastic, transparent, moving, morphing ghostlike form. This claiming of the freedom of the body is one of the defining emotions in The Scroll.

The Scroll (1989-90), watercolour and gouache on tea-stained wasli paper, 34.3x162.2 cm.

Courtesy Artist Studio and Sean Kelly Gallery NY

WATCH Shazia Sikander Art21

Read About the sale of album leaves from the Shahnameh in New York in 1996

WATCH Weeping Willows, Liquid Tongues

Quintuplet-Effect (2016), glass painting, 6.5 × 4 m.

Permanent site-specific commission.

Julis Romo Rabinowitz and Louis A Simpson International Building, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey.

Courtesy Artist Studio and Sean Kelly Gallery NY. Photo: Richard Barros

I started researching for this work in 1988, as the 1980s was marked by diminishing women’s rights in Pakistan.

I was inspired by Pakistani women activists, artists, poets, playwrights and many of my female friends. The fact that I chose to focus on a house was also because looming Hudood ordinances (a national bill that would diminish women’s rights) were such that as a young single woman you could not freely roam around the city without a male chaperone. It made sense to me to locate the work in the house, where I was bound to be spending the majority of my time. The work is a comment on the dynamic of a domestic space, including invisible labour performed by women and different class structures in the local Lahore society.

The painting reads left to right. You see the young woman stepping over a threshold, symbolised as a frame, taking herself and others (the viewer) along into a new territory, a new beginning. The woman in The Scroll is trapped in all her internal conflicts, too, yet remains an active agency, which was a departure from the trope of the woman often depicted in historical Indian paintings, like those of the Kangra school, as a passive figure at the mercy of an event yet to occur.

This work marked the beginning of my depicting women as proactive, intelligent, witty protagonists connected to the past in imaginative and abundant ways, a theme one can identify in my work through the years.

The Scroll was conceptualised as an epic poem. As such, it intended to capture an unfolding of an event, a story, a day, a lifetime. I worked on it for almost two years, sometimes 14-18 hours a day. The painstaking work was challenging, but also meditative. At the same time, I was also looking at Indian folk art, Bonnard, David Hockney, Behzad, and especially Safavid painting for their depiction of metaphorical space. The various patterns for animate and the inanimate surfaces in the painting were created from observation, and then stylised by understanding Safavid pictorial language.

The patterns are not lifted from old miniatures. I also analysed Chinese scroll and landscape painting and the structure of narrative in some films known to me then, like Satyajit Ray’s use of narrative and Akira Kurosawa’s use of multiple staged motion. As a result, the interwoven framing devices in The Scroll are creative takes on the function of sacred geometry in Islamic architectural spaces, how negative space creates rhythm and emotionality.

For me, the process of locating a relationship to tradition was to not mimic, but to regurgitate all that I devoured while researching and learning. What is originality? How does one create something anew? Imaginative possibilities abound within the world itself, not just within the realm of the mind. The world is full of mystery, containing within it a variety of distances between the real and the imagined. I am interested in history, in politics and also in the dynamism of form: form as something alive and in conversation with its time, space and language.

While I was developing iconographies via detailed small, dense, and elaborate miniatures in the 1990s, I simultaneously started to expand the images and ideas via murals and large-scale paper installations continued on page 4

asian art | summer 2021

4 People Pakistani-American, or MuslimAmerican – different class stratifications, movements across and from one culture to another, and back, the range of cultural differences, aspirations of immigrants, the various sites of conflict. Reading about displacement can vary dramatically depending whose perspective is shared.

I was recently reading illuminating essays by authors like Viet Thanh Nguyen, Maaza Mengiste, Aleksandar Hemon, Porochist Khakpour and Dina Niyari, and in each recognising a moment of truth that I too had experienced.

Much of my recent work touches on themes of struggle and conflict, memory, migration, tradition, and of course, the ultimate frame against which experience unfolds, death and its opposite, life.

Particularly works such as Parallax, Oil and Poppies and Flared, are critique and meditation on symbols of extraction, with links to nature, to imagination and art as sources of abundance as opposed to the desiccating logic of extraction. Art and imagination replenish, breathe life, and sow seeds of growth.

The power seen during the time of the East India Company (1600-1874) is not really all that different from today. Power is exercised across nations and boundaries through a network of corporations and supranational institutions. Empire is now expressed by a transnational ideology of global privatisation. All resources are gathered in the rubric of monetisation: language, labour, human intelligence…

Disruption as Rapture, Reckoning, The Last Post, Empire Follows Art: States of Agitation are works that allude to the interstices, the transitory, the mythos of the migrant and the citizen, women and power, the colonised, the artist, all that which is caught between worlds, artistic vocabularies, cultures, practices and histories.

Empire Follows Art: States of Agitation # 11 ( 2020), ink and gouache on paper, 16 x 11 inches. Photo: Jason Wyche. Courtesy Artist Studio and Sean Kelly Gallery NY. Photo: Jason Wyche

that evolved into video animations and collaborations with poets, lyricists, dancers, composers. Learning how to drop fear and embrace vulnerability to live the true potential of the mind with burning questions was exhilarating and painful. The search to create work that demanded internalising also meant dealing with the frustration to unlearn.

It was never as simple as branding myself as the contemporary miniaturist by creating small paintings exclusively in the miniature style. Though I continue to work in a variety of mediums and seek a multivalent and interdisciplinary approach to process, I do think my work is deeply connected to the act of drawing.

I try to bend and collaborate genres using drawing, drawing inspired from examining manuscript painting, how one can traverse all sorts of boundaries and dimension. I see my use of drawing as writing, where fiction meets non, prose meets poetry. Cross border, cross cultural.

The beating heart is drawing that carries the DNA of manuscript painting. I do see myself as part of the great lineage of manuscript painters. Does that make me traditional? Claiming one’s place in proximity to one’s cultural heritage, dispersed for years because of colonial legacy is another reorientation of boundaries.

AAN: Within miniature painting, even though you have opened up the discipline, what would you say are the basic codes, or rules, that need to be kept for it to still be considered miniature painting?

SS: I advocate for research and knowledge

of the history of the canon, its vast geo-political eras and patronage, the different schools, styles and spirit of the art form. It is important at least for me to delve deep into the wondrous iconographies and specific methods of painting to get a feel for its language and inherent discipline. It is critical to examine the canon from multiple vantage points to diversify the Eurocentric scholarship about the genre.

AAN: You address a number of issues (race, gender, sexuality among others) that all societies or countries need to discuss, today

asian art | summer 2021 |

I try to bend and collaborate genres using drawing

AAN: In today’s world, where communities and social groups have increased exponentially and taken on an unprecedented importance, would you agree that all of us are in a way caught between worlds?

SS: Absolutely. There are more

more than ever before. In your opinion, what led to that endeavour taking place today?

SS: My intent through the work I create

is to help pause and reflect, and open up conversations around race, power, sexuality, empire, aiding towards more nuanced ideas about the world. The wrestle to decolonise public education and history has been going on for a long time. It is imperative to also inspect the geographies of inequality through the question of gender.

My artistic process starts with reading and research, engagement with community, and careful listening that includes precisely these urgent, multiple cross-currents of re-examining colonial and imperial stories of race and representations by working across genres, fields and media. Gathering stories that include women who have been denied agency in the art world for a long time.

What is our sense of self verses someone else’s idea of us? Which myths are worthy of retelling? I also take inspiration from books. In the stories, I imagine many turn of events as happening in my own life. I am the seer and the seen, creating intimate portraits that explore race, culture, nature, gender, class and human intimacy. There are also paintings that depart from specific portraits to broader themes about economic histories and inherent violence to underlying currents in the political divisions of American society as well, keeping in mind the interplay between both sides of the hyphenate reality,

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uncertainties common to more of us, and inequities of class and wealth, uneven access to resources are creating more unstable global situations. The space between the migrant and the immigrant, the citizen and the foreigner is in flux, a space more and more communities are now defining on their own terms, telling stories that remind us of the complex,

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Promiscuous Intimacies (2020), patinated bronze, 42 x 24 x 18 inches.

Courtesy Artist Studio and Sean Kelly Gallery NY

WATCH Midnight Moment, Times Square

Uprooted Order 1 (1997), watercolour and gold paint on tea-stained wasli paper, 25.4 x 11.4 cm.

Courtesy Artist Studio and Sean Kelly Gallery NY. Here, the ghostly figure merges with Radha, who is often depicted in Hindu iconography as the preferred lover of Krishna. Here, to focus on Radha’s power, I removed Krishna from the equation. She is seen holding onto a hybrid creature that I crafted, a ‘chalawa’, here it refers to the poltergeist, my take on a creature that typically cannot be confined. With her one foot, she pins down a ghost-like shadow, a metaphor for the paradox of rootedness.

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dynamic, and evolving world we live in.

Yet, when events such as war and sanctions and exploitation of resources reverberate across the world, those affected most are ones with less power than those buffered through wealth. In a sense, what unifies us more now than ever is the age of finance and commodification. I recently explored this theme in a series of paintings in conversation with the Pakistani-American playwright Ayad Akhtar through the lens of his book Homeland Elegies (2020).

AAN: When completing a work of art, you conceive it ‘like a poem’. Can you elaborate?

SS: I have a deep affinity with poetry as a

catalyst, its ability to liven up language and to pack so much expression in a condensed form. I read poems for ideas for inspiration around detail, layer, tone, rhythm, metaphor, emotion, sentiment.

Intersections of feminism and poetry go hand in hand. Fahmida Riaz, Parveen Shakir, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Solmaz Sharif and Wislawa Szymborska are some of the poets that I have studied at various stages in my life. Artists assist in new ways of thinking, reframing history and imagining new possibilities as part of the broader processes of transformation in a society. Poetry marks moments of change in stark illuminating visuals. I love digging for such societal shifts when reading certain poets especially women, as they can offer counter perspectives to our prevalent hyper masculinised histories and ways of being.

AAN: An artist repeating himself is a comment we occasionally hear in the art world. You are part of a small group of artists (female and male) with the ability to express their ideas in many different ways, as you are mastering a whole range of media.

Throughout your career, you went from two dimensional to three dimensional, from small miniature painting to large site-specific installations, from paper to mosaic to video and sculpture, from static pieces to animated videos. While still a student at the NCA in Lahore, did you ever imagine becoming such a diverse and accomplished artist?

SS: I actually did, in not such literal ways,

but definitely knew that I was too restless and curious to keep making the same work continued on page 6

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6 People AAN: As this is an important and multifaceted issue, how do you think that art, and your art in particular, can contribute to the discussion?

SS: In 2017, I had the opportunity to be

part of the New York City Mayoral WATCH Advisory Commission on City Art, Disruption as Monuments and Markers and during that Rapture, 2016. HD process, hearing differing public opinion, video animation with 7.1 surround sound. studying public monuments, their 10 minutes, complicated histories, historical reckoning 7 seconds, music by and tensions between communities Du Yun featuring regarding representation, I felt the urge to Ali Sethi; respond to the overt male representation Commissioned by of historical monuments through an the Philadelphia anti-monument. I think my sculpture does Museum of Art offer alternative ways to engage the past without glorifying it.

Segments of Desire Go Wandering Off (1998), collage with watercolour and graphite, on tea-stained wasli paper, 24.3 x 50 cm. Courtesy Artist Studio and Sean Kelly Gallery NY. Many hyphenated identities clash and shift. Being Asian-American today encompasses not only South Asians but other new immigrant groups, for example, Cambodian-Americans and West Asians, or Arab American. These new immigrants are not only expanding the historical and geographical parameters of the term Asian-American, but they are also redefining what being American is about.

again and again! I think of art as a language, a tool, a means to communicate. At its heart is a pursuit and fruition of an idea. Ideas can take shape in multiple forms. I am a research driven artist and need to move in many unanticipated directions. Creatives think and express in many ways. I do not often hear male artists like William Kentridge being asked why he works in so many diverse languages? Right? I have seen him work in video, theatre, collage, drawing, performance, mosaic, installation, etc.

I do think that there are at times different standards for describing artists of colour, and women artists in particular are expected to perform and stay within their determined zones. I have been called a ‘miniaturist’ many times and asked why I do not stick to just making the small paintings. I think it is more of a concern of a commercial art world that tends to create a brand around an artist work, something that is tested and recognisable and can be banked upon safely.

AAN: Within your diverse practice, what led you towards glass mosaic?

SS: What led me to mosaic was

animation. It was the dynamism of the pixel that emerged in my mind as a parallel to the unit of a mosaic. I began experimenting with mosaic in 2015, when I received my first 70-foot, permanent, public art commission for Princeton University. Glass was a natural direction, as much of my work deals with transparency and light. This work for Princeton University’s economic and international departments building was conceived by sketching the over-arching theme of human economic interconnectivity and struggle for truth with references to history, religion, and literature to create a visual poem.

AAN: Your last solo exhibition in New York in the autumn of 2020 featured sculpture, which represents a major development. What triggered you to move in that direction?

SS: I was in conversation with the scholar

Gayatri Gopinath and inspired by her essay on my work, and decided to cull out the female protagonists from my paintings into sculptures. The title Promiscuous Intimacies refers to the title of her essay, where she speaks of the ‘promiscuous intimacies’ of multiple times, spaces, art historical traditions, bodies, desires and subjectivities. The sculpture’s sinuous entanglement of the Greco-Roman Venus and the Indian Devata has a suggestive embrace. The intertwined female bodies bear the symbolic weight of communal identities from across multiple temporal and geographic terrains. The archetypes of females are drawn from the Indian temple

asian art | summer 2021 |

AAN: In your videos, music plays an important part. You have worked on several occasions with music Pulitzer-Prize winner Du Yun (b 1977, in China). What appealed to you about her work and how did the collaboration with her come about?

SS: I met Du Yun when I was leaving the

Bellagio Center in 2009, after finishing a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation. It was some months later that I called her to collaborate on a work for the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. It made sense to me to engage Du Yun, as she grew up in Shanghai and was a New York transplant like myself. What strikes me as the fundamental enabler of our collaboration is our mutual investment in a multivalent, multidimensional form and state of experience. Du Yun’s interest in the polyrhythmic, or maybe the polytextural, is very much about building sound density in ways that parallel my employment of layers of colour and varying opacities to craft depth. Du Yun’s aesthetic is bold and wide, and the immensity of her sound works well with my use of intensely saturated colour as an emotional tool. Our shared straddling of the classical/traditional and its transformation with a degree of sculpture (I am citing the captive apsara’s improvisation is both playful and utterly torso in The Met’s collection). I added limbs to her truncated form and entwined serious. Since we both have tremendous respect for tradition through our training it with a Mannerist Venus, drawing attention to the overlaps and intimacies of in craft and technique, our inventiveness is intrinsic to an internal dismantling not an Indo-Greek histories.

I first sketched out the female characters external effect. in 2000 for a banner for MoMA, when I worked with the curator Fereshteh AAN: Your exhibition at the Morgan Library, Daftari. I was culling art history’s New York, which stays on throughout classicism and ethnocentric reactions to the end of this summer, is entitled Indian Art, as per Johan Joachim Extraordinary Realities. What realities are you Winckelmann’s doctrine. I was also exactly referring to? Also, can you present making a point by entangling Mannerism, the exhibition? the anti-classical impulse within the SS: This exhibition is an in-depth survey Western tradition, alongside Indian art, of the first 15 years of my practice both as accomplice witnesses of a one(1987-2002) and its pioneering role in sided history. In the sculpture, the women bringing painting traditions from South evoke non-heteronormative desires that are and Central Asia into dialogue with often cast as foreign and inauthentic, and contemporary practices in Pakistan and instead challenge the viewer to imagine a tracing the early years in the US, when the different present and future. From the work catapulted into international Indus valley excavations to the Chola prominence. The exhibition is book ended bronzes, bronze and metal casting has had with the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, a long history in South Asia, where often and examines my work’s engagement with the sacred and tangible objects interacted the cultural and political shifts that define in essential and functional way with the 1990s decade. human activities and socioeconomic The exhibition was conceived first practices. The bronze sculpture coloured in through the accompanying book, edited various patinas highlights that classical by professor Sadia Abbas (author of painted statuary was polychromatic and At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and the not necessarily ‘lily white’, as often Postcolonial Predicament, published 2014) constructed over time in popular from Rutgers University and Jan Howard imagination. ‘Colour prejudice’ points out from the Rhode Island School of Design the historian Sarah Bond, is ‘how we Museum. All the voices in the book colour or fail to colour classical antiquity is intersected with me in significant ways in often a result of our own cultural values’. the 1980s and 1990s, including artists For me, connecting the patina to the larger Julie Mehretu and Rick Lowe, curator discussions on colour in classical sculpture Vasif Kortun, historian Faisal Devji, also links the issue of classicism with Gender and Sexuality professor Gayatri American monuments and memorials, Gopinath, art historian Kishwar Rizvi that are often revered as symbols of and my teachers Bashir Ahmed and patriotism in their classicism aesthetic.

Dennis Congdon.

When asking what stories and whose The exhibition travels to RISD perspectives get commemorated in public Museum (autumn 2021) and MFA spaces, BIPOC (black, indigenous, and Houston (spring 2022), following the other people of colour) are the least trajectory of where I created the artworks. represented. One such current heated The vocabulary and themes around conversation is around the removal of gender, sexuality, race, class, and history colonial and confederate monuments. that I explored in the late 1980s and 1990s

I travelled around the wings of my imagination, carrying my roots within

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WATCH Parallax, 2013.

Three-channel, single-image HD video animation, with 5.1 surround sound. 15 minutes, 26 seconds, music

by Du Yun

WATCH Reckoning, 2020, HD video animation with 7.1 surround sound. 4 minutes, 16 seconds, music

by Du Yun featuring Zeb Bangash

continue to resonate in contemporary discourse. The exhibition historicises and coalesces the ideas, themes, and multiple languages in the work from perspectives both within and outside of the US. Polarising dichotomies that have long existed such as East-West, IslamicWestern, Asian-White, oppressive-free, my encountering such prevalent binaries in the early 1990s led to an outburst of androgynous forms, fragmented bodies, headless torsos, and self-rooted floating half-human figures that refused to belong, to be fixed, or to be stereotyped. Many female iconographies from comical to dark started resisting categorisation. I was responding to my inability to locate Brown South-Asian representation in the feminist space in the 1990s art world and art history books. Back then, the monolithic category often used in art history books, ‘third-world feminism’, was limiting.

AAN: Your latest project, Roots and Wings, is a children’s book. Whose initiative was it and what is your message to the future generation of art enthusiasts, artists, and most importantly, young adults?

SS: Five years ago, I was invited to do this

by Charles Kim, as he was working as an editor with MoMA Publishing. The project fell on the side and then got picked up in 2018. I felt it was important to do this book, especially when a Muslim ban was placed by Trump and there was a steady rise of anti-Asian hate. I was introduced to a few children’s books illustrators and ended up working with Hanna Barczyk, as her bold female iconography in editorial illustrations had synergy with the feminist thrust in my work. Initially, I was invited to write, but realised that writing for young children is far more complex than I understood. I was thrilled to find Amy Novesky to co-author with. She is a Director for Cameron Kids, a division of Abrams, and I loved how she had written about Louise Bourgeois, Frida Kahlo, and Georgia O’Keeffe.

I did not grow up with books about young girls becoming artists, and specifically painters. Even now, there is a dearth of books encouraging young girls of colour to follow their creativity. Another reason for me to do this book was to loosen up some of the persisting representations around Asians as well as Muslims. Asians are regularly woven into images of doctors and engineers, migrant workers, but never into artists. There are also very few books about Muslim children being just children and not siloed into stereotypes. Cultural details abound in this book, but are not reduced to token representation. What I wanted to convey through the book is that curiosity and the desire to engage and express, is universal. The story is based on my growing up in Lahore in a multigenerational home with paternal grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, siblings and cousins. As a young child, I was into nature, outdoors, maths and exposed to stories through books. I ran around in the neighbourhood with other children, playing crickets, roller skating, climbing trees, flying kites and drawing.

To reflect upon my childhood was a fresh opportunity for me to be reminded how creativity surrounds us in ordinary and unexpected ways. One of my early childhood memories is of an abandoned school bus converted by volunteers in the neighbourhood into the Aleph Laila book bus library. Books fed my soul and imagination as a child and continued to inspire and ground me as an adult. Through books, I travelled around the wings of my imagination, carrying my roots within. Art is how we learn to tell stories about our truths, and how we negotiate a place in the world for future generations. My advice to the youth is to practice introspection and resilience, and to think of creativity as a catalyst, a way of living and enriching community.

• Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities, at the Morgan Library, New York, from 18 June to 26 September 2021, themorgan.org

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8 People

I

t is impossible to write about the Bulgarian artist Maryn Varbanov (1932-1989) without writing about his wife Song Huai-Kuei (1937-2006), too. They became lovers in an austere Beijing in the 1950s. He was an ambitious tapestry artist who went on to make his reputation in Europe. She, equally ambitious, would become the glamorous figure known as Madame Song, who for 30 years was Pierre Cardin’s business muse helping him establish the Cardin fashion brand in China and establishing his restaurant Maxim’s Beijing, in the 1980s. The story of their forbidden love affair is one of intrigue, deception, and triumph over cultural adversity in a country that forbade mixed marriages.

The dramas and tragedies of Varbanov’s and Song’s lives look set to capture the imagination of a younger Chinese generation in 2023, when the M+ Museum in Hong Kong will exhibit Varbanov’s extensive notebooks, archives and several of his monumental ‘soft sculptures’ alongside the 130 Cardin outfits that Madame Song wore almost every day. Song’s wardrobe of exclusive Cardin clothes were garments brought in from Paris and Japan to be worn by the models at the runway shows. When the models and Cardin left town, the clothes stayed behind and entered Madame Song’s wardrobe. Boriana Song, their daughter, who lives in Paris, has donated everything to M+.

The couple met at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in 1954 where Varbanov was one of a group of exchange students from Bulgaria, the first such group allowed into post liberation China. He was a painfully shy 21-year-old with a pencil-thin moustache, which gave him the dashing good looks of the young Errol Flynn film star from an earlier age.

Song – also a student at CAFA – was a slim confident 18-year-old who wore sensible blouses and did her hair in tight plaits and came from a family of intellectuals. Song would fill in time at home as her father’s secretary, who was a classical literature scholar at Tianjin University, copying his work and writing notes and letters for him. With her prim demeanour and background Song looked like a committed child of the revolution and was thought to be the ideal candidate to chaperone the Eastern Bloc Bulgarians and teach them Mandarin. Little did anyone know.

She was immediately attracted to Varbanov and he, in turn, was smitten with her at a time in China when mixed relationships were unknown and when young lovers hardly went beyond calling each other, ‘comrade’. Even holding hands in public was unacceptable.

Boriana Song recalls her mother telling her how she had once asked Varbanov to dance at a school party, but he refused.

As the music played, she danced instead with Varbanov’s classmate in an attempt to make him jealous. ‘My mother thought she would teach him a lesson!’, Boriana said.

When the school became suspicious of the couple’s closeness, Song was forced to declare in writing that she would end the relationship. They were forbidden to speak to each other, in public at least. Song developed a secret way of communicating with Varbanov.

If she wore her hair in one long plait it was a signal that it was clear for them to meet. Two plaits meant no; they could not meet.

Song’s family remained in ignorance of the liaison although their tryst was dramatically uncovered when Song was away at summer camp. She wrote two letters home – one to her father and one to Varbanov, but somehow the letters became mixed up and their relationship was exposed. Even so, asian art | summer 2021 |

Maryn Varbanov and Madame Song...

A love story

by Michael Young

Maryn Varbanov in Sofia, in 1973, with one of his works, Red Bird Madam Song in Maxim’s Beijing Maryn Varbanov and Song Huai-Kuei photographed when they first met as students in China

Song was determined to marry Varbanov and the urgency was exacerbated when she discovered she was pregnant with Boriana. She took the extraordinary step of writing to Zhou Enlai, China’s first Premier, asking for permission to marry a Westerner. It was several months before Enlai replied. There was no law against mixed marriages, he wrote, while cautioning her about the cultural problems she might encounter and advising her ‘never to forget her own’.

In December 1956, they married in Beijing at a ceremony presided over by the president of CAFA. It was the first mixed marriage since Liberation. They stayed on at CAFA until 1959 when they moved with their infant daughter to Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, a gruelling 10-day journey by the TransSiberian train via Moscow.

Over the ensuing decade or so, they built a career as collaborating artists. It would be 16 years before they returned to China, briefly, when in 1974 they received a call from the Chinese embassy notifying them that Deng Xiaoping, then acting foreign minister, had appealed to all overseas Chinese

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citizens to return to visit their families to mark the 25th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. The Cultural Revolution was in its last throes and Deng Xiaoping was on the verge of introducing reforms that would lead to the opening up of China and the transformation of the country into a socialist market economy. The lives of millions of Chinese would change for ever, as would the lives of Varbanov and Madame Song when they returned to Europe.

In 1979, they met the fashion designer Pierre Cardin at the International Contemporary Art Fair (FIAC) in Paris where Varbanov was exhibiting several of his threedimensional fabric sculptures at Hervé Odermatt Gallery. In an impetuous move, Cardin bought the whole of the exhibition for his personal art collection and sent the work off to his newly opened Espace Pierre Cardin in New York. Song was vivacious and attractive and inevitably Cardin became enamoured with her and was receptive to a proposal that she put to him. She had plans, she said, to return to visit her family in Beijing and suggested to asianartnewspaper |

Cardin that perhaps they could collaborate on something while she was there.

Cardin, ever the shrewd businessman, had pioneered advances in ready-to-wear and in licensing his brand in Europe and America but had yet to gain a strong foothold in the Chinese market. Song’s offer came at the right moment and Cardin accepted with enthusiasm. She should launch his brand there, he said, organise fashion models and runway shows whilst also planning the launch of his restaurant, Maxim’s, that he wanted to open in Beijing. By late 1980, Song was back in Beijing and working full-time for Cardin, joined by the rest of the family in 1983.

They stayed at the Beijing Hotel, two blocks from Tiananmen Square, where Cardin also had an office. They could see the square from their hotel window, Boriana recalled. While Song was run ragged recruiting models, many of who were literally plucked from the streets of Beijing, Varbanov spent his days drinking coffee and smoking in the hotel café – that locals called the Zoo because they would stand and

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They lived at an extraordinary time that saw great social change in China

watch the foreigners inside. In clouds of cigarette smoke, Varbanov would work feverishly on his conceptual sketches, pouring a tsunami of ideas onto the pages of his notebooks. They remained a fantasy, as many of his ideas such as a floating island on West Lake in Hangzhou, were never realised.

Varbanov’s own career as a tapestry artist had flourished in Europe where tapestry making had a long history and which had experienced a renaissance in the early 20th century with the collaboration of artists such as Braque, Picasso, and Matisse. But tapestry even in the hands of such illustrious exponents remained the craft of artisans who transcribed their designs onto fabric. In contrast, Varbanov’s tapestries proved revolutionary at the time in that they were sculptural threedimensional objects – often very large – made from assorted fabrics and natural materials such as goats’ hair, which he brought over from Bulgaria. He had twice shown at the Lausanne Tapestry Biennale (in 1969 and 1971), and in 1979 he work was included in the French Modern Art Tapestry exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris.

People 9 In 1983, when Varbanov arrived in Beijing he found a city vastly different from the one he had left in 1959. The population was edging towards prosperity under Deng’s reforms and the influence of Russian social realism on a generation of artists had long succumbed to exciting new avantgarde experimentation, a terrain occupied by artists such as Ai Weiwei, Huang Rui, and Ma Desheng – all of whom were members of the Stars Group that was active between 1979 and 1983, who used their personal experiences and social issues as their subject matter.

The ever-resourceful Song found a disused carpet factory in Sanlitun, close to what is now the Great Wall Hotel, that was to become Varbanov’s studio and where he invited young art students to join him to explore ‘soft sculpture’, as his work would be called in China. He began work on a series of monumental pieces that brought together a European approach to weaving – using wool, cotton, and goat’s hair with Chinese aesthetic sensibilities. Varbanov was able to show this work at an exhibition he organised at the National Museum of China in Beijing, which proved to be wildly successful. The American artist Robert Rauschenberg, who was concurrently showing in Beijing, is reported to have said that the best exhibition in Beijing was not his, but Varbanov’s. Tapestry was, Varbanov wrote in 1988 for the exhibition Chinese Modern Tapestry at Pao Galleries in Hong Kong, ‘An inseparable component of modern architecture’.

In 1987, he was invited to establish a tapestry school at CAFA in Hangzhou, fulfilling a dream he had harboured for over 30 years. One of his students in Hangzhou was the Chinese artist Gu Wenda, who credits Varbanov as having pushed him towards freestanding tapestry work. The Hangzhou school still exists today and Gu Wenda went on to became one of the school’s most illustrious alumni, as well as one of China’s most accomplished artists whose use of hair – albeit human hair – has permeated his practice over many years.

In 1989, Varbanov was preparing a large net-like work called Perpetual Motion for an exhibition at the Hangzhou China Academy of Arts.

Suspended from high in the gallery space the net gave off endless shadow configurations. It was to be the last work he ever made. He stayed alone in the gallery late one night and climbed up a three-metre-high ladder to fix something on the work when he fell hurting his left hip. In hospital, ex-rays detected lung cancer. Always a heavy smoker, he died in July 1989, aged 56, just weeks away from the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square where students calling for political reform and freedom of expression, were subjected to suppression by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

For her part in the story, Madame Song helped nudge China’s fashion culture towards a future where art and fashion could exist in a symbiotic relationship. In her role working with Cardin, she recruited models for his incipient runway shows when nothing like it had previously existed in China.

Song literally plucked young men and women from the Beijing streets and overnight turned them into fashion models. Few had any idea of what a runway fashion show was and the idea of appearing in one was revolutionary.

In less than two decades, fashion in China had moved from ubiquitous blue, black, and green uniforms worn during the 1960s and 1970s to lose fitting multicoloured garments and stylish Western-inspired, massproduced, clothes much of which was

manufactured under the Cardin brand.

Song’s life as the front-of-house hostess at Maxim’s possessed a legendary aura and the restaurant thrived under her creativity and energy.

It has hardly changed since it opened in 1983; the Tiffany-style, stained-glass windows have remained as has the tiny stage set into the back wall. There was a constant stream of celebrities and high-profile visitors through the restaurant, including international movie moguls and fashion industry types. Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino called by, as did British fashion designer John Galliano.

Madame Song rubbed shoulders with them all, including China’s political and social elite. Few ordinary Chinese could afford the restaurant’s inflated prices where a meal would set them back the equivalent of three month’s pay.

The filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, was another habitué when he was in Beijing filming his epic biopic The Last Emperor (1987). At Bertolucci’s suggestion, Madame Song was given a role in the movie as the mother of Puyi, the last emperor. Nineteen thousand extras were needed through the course of the film and the PLA was drafted in to create the crowd scenes. Madame Song made ‘Maxim’s a cultural centre where China and the world could exchange ideas,’ Boriana remembered.

Madame Song died of lung cancer in 2007, the same disease that had taken her husband. She had been diagnosed six months earlier, but had kept the disease a secret and could always be found at the end of the bar in Maxim’s resplendent in her Cardin couture. Her death occurred on the same day that Cardin flew into Beijing to attend a fashion show. When he heard that Song had died, he is said to have sobbed all the way from the airport to his hotel.

She was capable of doing anything anywhere, Cardin is reported to have previously said of Song. She could speak seven languages, he said. He was wrong. She could only speak four!

While Madame Song’s legacy has held firm in China Varbanov’s has not been so fortunate. His contribution to art in China has slipped into obscurity.

Even though the school he established in Hangzhou has survived, Varbanov’s ‘soft sculptures’ have been virtually erased from Chinese contemporary art history.

Pi Li, a senior curator at M+, commented on the couple, ‘Varbanov and Song left quite a legacy. They met in the 1950s, moved to Bulgaria in the 1960s, returned to China in the 1980s, where Song collaborated with Pierre Cardin on fashion and in establishing Maxims Beijing. And all this, amazingly, happened during the period of the Cold War’.

One can only hope that the chill of a new Cold War will not settle over Hong Kong and China, disrupting Pi Li’s 2023 plans, bestowing on Maryn Varbanov and Song Huai-Kuei more years of obscurity rather than letting their story of love, collaboration, and artistry be told.

Madam Song as Puyi’s mother, Youlan, with some of the cast from The Last Emperor (1987)

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10 People

Life in Edo

Russel Wong in Kyoto I

n commemoration of the 55th anniversary of Singapore-Japan Diplomatic Relations, the Asian Civilisations Museum has organised a joint exhibition of Edo-period prints and Singaporean photographer Russel Wong’s series that focuses on life in Kyoto. Presented in two parts, each spotlights different periods and themes of Japan. The first, Life in Edo, explores the lifestyles and fashions of the later Edo period (1603-1868), often thought of as the final era of traditional Japan, through a display of ukiyo-e woodblock prints. The second is the display Russel Wong in Kyoto, a selection of photographs of the former imperial capital, which looks at the beauty of nature and architecture, as well as documenting the vanishing traditions of the geisha in the city.

The Japanese ukiyo-e masters provide a window into everyday life in Edo through their prints, explores how people lived – exploring ideas of beauty, festivals, travel, food, entertainment and their favourite beauty spots. Bursting with life, the pleasure quarters, or ‘floating world’, seen in these prints is an expression of the new economic and social ambitions of the Japanese people as the nation became increasingly urbanised. This joie de vivre and desire stylishness and extravagance was manifest in the subject matter chosen by woodblock print artists of the period. The group of 157 prints in the show is the largest collection to be shown in a single exhibition in Singapore to date and features works from the great masters, including Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Hiroshige, Kitagawa Utamaro and Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

This new period in history started with Tokugawa Ieyasu’s defeat of the Toyotomi forces in the Siege of Osaka (1614-15), when a new reign name of Genna (1615) was declared and the turbulent era of war experienced during the Momoyama period (15680-1600) ended. The Tokugawa rule, which lasted until 1867, also resulted in a shift of power to Edo, although the capital remained with the emperor in Kyoto, with that city remaining the bastion of traditional Japanese culture. However, the change of power to the Tokugawa’s city of choice, along with the rapid urbanisation of the population – and importantly the development of trade – created new social classes, hobbies, and customs as the townspeople (chonin) gained wealth and broke away from the older, more rigid, feudal system. Artists and publishers, seeing this desire among the burgeoning merchant and middle classes for the pleasure quarters, created works that satisfied this demand, selling prints of popular kabuki actors, or famous

Left: Enjoying the Doll Festival (1861)

by Utagawa Kunisada, also known as Toyokuni III. Photo: Nakau Collection Lower Left: Hair dressing from the series Scenery of Famous Places and Twelve Aspects of Beauties. Around, circa 1801-03, by Kitagawa Utamaro.

Photo: Nakau Collection Lower Right: Looks delicious, Appearance of a Courtesan in the Kaei Period, from the series Thirty-Two Aspects of Women (1888) by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi. Photo: Nakau Collection

courtesans of the day, and mementoes of pilgrimages to important shrines.

Travelogues also extolled the scenic beauty, or historic interest, of spots in distant provinces.

After the great Meireki Fire of 1657 in Edo, the licensed pleasure quarters of the city moved to a new location called the Shin Yoshiwara.

At the same time, another new area, the Yanagibashi was created whilst the Yoshiwara district was under construction. This district eventually became known as Shimbashi and gained prominence from 1867, when the Meiji emperor established himself in the Imperial Palace and the nearby area became the Ginza district we know today.

• Until 19 September at the

Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore, nhb.gov.sg/acm/ • Artist & Curator Tour– featuring Clement Onn and Russel Wong Wednesday, 11 August 2021.

Hours: 7.30pm to 9pm, Onsite.

S$30 per participant. Limited to 8 participants. Booking essential.

• Food Talks on Asian Civilisations Museum Facebook. Learn about history and food culture of Edo-period Japan that continues today in these videos. On 7 Jul 2021 at 8pm; and Saturday, 14 Aug 2021, at 8pm.

Visit facebook.com/ asiancivilisationsmuseum

Right: Geiko Sayaka helping Maiko Satsuki with her kanzashi (hair ornaments). Kyoto, 2011, archival pigment print on photo rag.

Top: The white kimono collar worn by the geiko. Kyoto, 2011, archival pigment print on photo rag.

Bottom: Geiko Fukune with her tea bowl from the Waraku kiln. Kyoto, Nashinoki Shrine, 2020, archival pigment print on photo rag.

Photos: courtesy of Russel Wong

asian art | summer 2021 |

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To complement these prints, a display of the photographs taken in Kyoto by Russel Wong, featuring the lives of geisha in Kyoto. The images catch rare glimpses of the world of the geiko (as geisha are commonly called in Kyoto) and maiko (apprentices) in Kyoto. The photographs have never been previously shown in public.

Images of geisha appear across many media and are some of the best-known images of Japan today. The fascination with geisha and their portrayal has, for centuries, been an important subject for Japanese artists. Geisha have been part of society in Japan for centuries, dating back to at least the Nara period (710794) and their traditions probably grew out of dance. The art of the solo dance has been kept alive through continuous performance with records still existing today from the classic Heian period (794-1185) of the ancient court dance known as bugaku. Solo dance is also an important part of other ancient Japanese performance traditions, such as in noh and kabuki theatre.

These images of geisha in ukiyo-e usually portray the subjects wearing their heavy distinctive makeup, luxurious kimono, seen playing the shamisen or koto, attending to their elaborate hairstyles, performing dances, singing, or on parade in the latest fashions, at the popular beauty spots in the city. The subject matter rarely changed as the life of a tradition geisha changed little over the centuries. Indenture to a geisha house (okiya) often began at the age of 10. During the Meiji period (18681912), girls were trained as apprentices (maiko) in the music and dance, conversation, tea ceremony and games. The apprentice period still begins when a young woman finds an onesan (older sister), a full geisha who will be her mentor.

Finally, the important ceremony that marks the transition from maiko to geisha is the erikae, which means ‘changing of the collar’. At this time, the maiko exchanges her red, patterned, collar for a solid white one, a symbol of her debut life as a geisha.

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People 11

Before the Storm (March 1920) by Ito Shinsui, 32.9 × 23.8 cm, Gift of Oliver Statler, Art Institute of Chicago. Here the artist pays homage to Vincent van Gogh’s painting Wheat Field with a Lark (1887)

Before the Mirror (July 1916) by Ito Shinsui 44.2 × 29.3 cm.

Bequest of Henry C Schwab, Art Institute of Chicago.

The print is inscribed with the word shihitsu (trial drawing), marking this work as the first collaboration between Ito Shinsui and the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo, who had spotted the artist’s painting of this image and approached him to be a partner

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he prints designed by Japanese artist Ito Shinsui (1898–1972) feature traditional subjects, bold colours, and realism that went beyond 19th-century norms, a combination that achieved remarkable commercial success. In his homeland his reputation rested upon his paintings (from his later years), but Shinsui’s technically accomplished prints were hugely popular overseas, which encouraged him to design works specifically for foreign audiences.

Ito Shinsui was born in Tokyo to a relatively wealthy merchant family.

When he was around nine years old, however, his father’s business failed, and Shinsui left school to work at a printing factory, where he was an assistant typographer and lithographer at the Fukagawa Workshop of the Tokyo Printing Company. In 1911, he entered the studio of Kaburagi Kiyotaka (1878-1972), who was trained in the tradition of the Utagawa School, known for their depictions of beautiful women and Kabuki actors.

Shinsui’s talent and self-discipline earned him a prize in the first exhibition he participated in – aged fourteen. His early works won many awards, including a prize at the Peace Memorial Tokyo Exposition. Shinsui also supplied illustrations to popular newspapers, such as Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun (published from 1872 to 1943).

In June 1915, one of his paintings was displayed in a shop and caught the eye of the successful publisher Watanabe Shozaburo (1885-1962), who asked Shinsui to collaborate on a print version. The result was Before the Mirror, first published in 1916 – the start of a long and fruitful collaboration.

By 1927, Shinsui had established his own independent studio and although many of his early works were direct reflections of ukiyo-e in subject matter

and in style, his technique was considered revolutionary at the time.

The artist’s rise in popularity was in tandem with the changes seen in the early 20th century society and the rise of two important art-print movements in Japan: shin-hanga (new prints) and sosaku-hanga (creative prints). Ito Shinsui was associated with the shinhanga movement, which flourished during the Taisho (1912-1926) and Showa periods (1912-1989) – a time of change, as a watershed moment was created when the Meiji Emperor died and the Taisho Emperor succeeded to the throne. Shi-hanga strove to revitalise classical ukiyo-e of the 18th and early 19th centuries that had fallen out of popularity in the last decade with the onslaught of rapid industrialisation and Westernisation during the Meiji period (1868-1912), plus the arrival of new technology with the advent of photography.

This movement produced works that were labour intensive, as it utilised the classical collaborative (hanmoto) system, an almost assembly-line division of skills, where the creation of a print began with the artist’s drawn design, which was then passed on to the block carver, then to the printer and finally to the publisher/distributor for sale to the public.

The collaboration between Shinsui and Watanabe continued until 1960, this productive partnership produced 63 bijin-ga (depictions of beautiful women) that are Shinsui’s most enduring legacy. They also produced several dozen landscapes. The earliest of these series, Omni Hakkei (Eight Views of Omi), is included in an exhibition of Shinsui’s work currently at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Ito Shinsui’s work with Watanabe confirmed his position as the most important artist in the shin-hanga movement, which helped ukiyo-e

In Spring (February 1917) by Ito Shinsui, 50.0 × 25.2 cm. Frederick W Gookin Collection, Art Institute of Chicago

The Prints of Ito Shinsui actors (yakusha-e), and birds-andmovement, Ito Shinsui not only transform and survive into the 20th flowers (kacho-e). helped revive the art of the woodblock century . However, in later years, the In the early part of the Meiji period artist worked mainly in aother style – print, but also helped document the and into the early 20th century, there as a celebrated Nihonga (Japanese- extraordinary changes taking place at was little interest in the shin-hanga the time in Japan, both in society and style paintings) artist. In 1933, Shinsui prints in Japan – the real market for the artistic world. became a judge for the Teiten, the this new style lay in the West, where The height of this movement was Shin-bunten, and the Nitten (Japanese both ukiyo-e and shin-hanga prints from around 1915 to 1942 and then Art Exhibition) and was honoured by briefly from 1946 through the 1950s. were considered fine art. This interest membership of the Japan Art was mainly created by the publisher, The shin-hanga artists’ inspiration not Academy.

Watanabe, who tirelessly produced only came from Japanese subject From 1937, Shinsui began to take a English-language catalogues to matter, but also from European new interest in landscape prints and market these prints and the artists he created the series Oshima junikei, Impressionism with the frequent worked with to the West. It worked. incorporation of foreign techniques of (Twelve Views of Oshima). A visit to representing light and shadow that Articles about the movement began to China, in 1939, further stimulated appear in English-language art could explore the ‘mood’ of the subject this trend and, in 1943 during the magazines around the world, Second World War, he published – especially in landscapes. bolstering their popularity. Watanabe The opening up of Japan during this three Nanyo Sukecchi (Sketches from was acutely aware that their best period also saw the introduction of the South), after visiting the war zone market lay abroad, as these new prints other Western influences in art that as a Japanese Navy official war artist. portrayed the nostalgic and often The government, in 1952, disrupted the representation of romanticised views of Japan that were traditional subject matter as it was recognised his mastery of woodblock previously depicted in prints. However, so prized and promoted in the West. design and his work designated as Exhibitions were held in Tokyo (to as in the traditional ukiyo-e of the Intangible Cultural Property, an event attract tourists and foreign residents), previous centuries, these modern that was commemorated with the artists, including such important new- and sent to international exhibitions print Tresses, and later in the decade he of Japanese art, such as those held in thinking artists such as Hiroshi became a member of the Japan Art 1930 and 1936, at the Toledo Museum Academy. As the 1950s advanced, Yoshida (1876-1950) and Kawase of Art, Ohio, along with several Hasui (1883-1957), also still relied on Shinsui was creating more Nihonga exhibitions held in the UK and France. the same traditional themes, just paintings that included folding portrayed in a new way, in such Accordingly, they became wildly screens and albums, as well as hanging popular from the 1920s and 1930s traditional themes as landscapes scrolls – he was equally at home on paper or silk, and for subject matter (fukei-ga), famous places (meisho), onwards in Europe and the US. Ito Shinsui recognised that his beautiful women (bijin-ga), kabuki would often choose female subjects prints needed to reflect this watershed drawn from society or bourgeois life. period in Japan and needed to record He was highly skilled at portraying the emergence of modernity in Japan the modern world using Japanese – and to a greater extent the West. artistic traditions, looking to the Shinsui also understood the world of dance, geishas, or the theatre commercial aspect of this process, as for subject matter. he saw the demand created by The final accolade in his life was in Watanable for his work. This changing 1970, two years before his death, when world allowed shin-hanga artists to he received the Order of the Rising ride a wave of popularity, when their Sun, a decoration created by the Meiji prints were sold all over the world. A Emperor in 1875 and given by the The Eyebrow Pencil (1928) by Ito popularity that continues to this day. government to honour distinguished Shinsui, one of the artist’s most achievements by its citizens. popular prints. Bequest of Earle As undoubtedly one of the most Ludgin, Mary and Earle Ludgin • Until 13 June at the Art Institute of important artists of the shin-hanga Collection, Art Institute of Chicago Chicago, artic.edu asian art | summer 2021

12 Travel

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Ladakh

itting in the fertile Zanskar Valley with the mighty Indus river running through the centre, the town of Leh is dramatically encircled by snow-capped mountains.

This tributary of the Indus also gives the high desert plateau a surprising greenness during the summer months.

Looking across to the Ladakh and Zanskar Range mountains from the Shanti stupa on the outskirts of town, you can see the mountain ranges disappearing into the distance with the river moving like a green snake through the valley. The short summer months bring a productive period of farming for the locals that prepares them for the subzero winters, when they are often cut off from the rest of the world. This also means a relatively short tourist season for the region, with flights often booked far in advance, if you do not want to drive up from the south on the Srinagar-Leh highway.

Leh first developed as a trading post as it sat on the crossroads of the trans-Himalayan trade. Merchants to the town came from a wide area, including Yarkand, Kashgar, Kashmir,

Tibet, as well as Afghanistan and North India. The trans-Himalayan trade and the Silk Road also brought Buddhism to western Ladakh from Kashmir in approximately the 2nd century. It was also entangled in the Great Game during the 19th-century, when the British and Russian empires played hide-and-seek politics along their borders. It is also an ancient crossroads, where Central Asia, China, India and Pakistan meet, from the Karakoram range to the north to the Himalayas to the south. Ever since the early trade routes came through the region, it has attracted pilgrims, adventurers, merchants and spies. When the Chinese authorities closed the borders between Tibet Autonomous Region and Ladakh in the 1960s, international trade dwindled, and the Indian government changed tatics to promoting tourism to the area.

In 2019, Ladakh had its latest reincarnation and became a Union Territory of India, however, as the region remains politically sensitive, the Indian Army retain a strong presence in Leh, with large barracks for the

military situated near the airport. The army presence has also brought good access roads from the south.

The town’s roots date from the early 15th century, when fortifications were built by the first Namgyal king in Leh along with a small royal residence on the mountain ridge above the town. The Namgyals rose to power in the 15th century, according to the Ladakh Chronicles, when Bhagan united Ladakh by overthrowing the Maryul dynasty and took the surname Namgyal (meaning victorious) to become the longest-ruling dynasty of the area.

Overlooking Leh town is another early building from this early period, Namgyal Tsemo, founded in 1430.

Although a small building, Namgyal Tsemo monastery (or locally gompa) has a strong presence that demands attention. The complex comprises the gon-khang (room of guardian deities) and the fort. The monastery also enshrines a 8-metre-high statue of the Maitreya (future) Buddha, as well as preserved frescoes in the prayer room. Tashi Namgyal’s fort, originally part of the complex, is now Above: Mulbekh Chamba, one of the three Maitreya to be found in in the Kargil district in Ladakh Below: Shey Palace, the summer residence of the Namgyal dynasty, heriditary rulers of Ladakh

The unfurling of the great thangka at Hemis monastery in 2016 at the Hemis Tsechu. The next festival is in 2028

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14 Indian Painting

One from a pair of painted and lacquered album covers, Mughal, circa 1730-50, painted leather, 42.5 x 27.3 cm, cat. No. 38, Eastern Encounters, Royal Collections Trust

Royal Kota Ladies Shoot Tiger, Kota School, Rajasthan, opaque watercolour heightened with gold on paper, 19th century, 43.7 x 55.9 cm. Private Collection

Ladies Who Hunt

by Rita Dixit

I

shot my first panther, aged twelve’, purrs Maharani Gayatri Devi (1919-2009), the last Queen of Jaipur, India in her enchanting memoirs, A Princess Remembers.

Credited with promoting the education of girls and ending purdah (the seclusion of upper-class women) in the princely state, this glamorous royal brought a touch of the ‘jet set’ to the royal hunt, shirkar, captured in this case through the medium of the 1940s camera lens.

For the Rajput Hindu kingdoms, hunting was as much a social ritual as a leisurely pastime. The coming of spring for example was celebrated with the aheri, or spring hunt, an astrologically fixed event where wild boar would be slain using lances and sometimes Saluki dogs. A successful hunt was considered to be a good omen for the coming year.

The most detailed shirkar scenes were those painted by artists in Udaipur (Mewar), who maintained an almost continuous pictoral record of royal hunts from the early 1700s until the 1940s. A variety of animals were hunted, but the killing of a tiger was a royal prerogative. Depictions of lion and tiger hunts in lush forests by 18th- and 19th-century artists in the kingdom of Kotah are among the most iconic of Indian paintings and will be dealt with later in the article.

Under the early Mughal rulers, the shirkar was a powerful symbol of territorial dominion and martial prowess. Mughal chroniclers describe the quasi-military qamargah hunt.

Dating back to the Mongols, the qamargah hunt involved thousands of

asian art | summer 2021 |

The Huntress: Modelled on Chand Bibi, India, 1680-1700, North Deccan, ex-James Ivory Collection, opaque watercolour on stiffened cloth, gold highlights, 30.2 x 22.4 cm, now in the collection of Louvre Abu Dhabi © Louvre Abu Dhabi / APF

beaters, who would corral prey such as blackbuck antelope, Indian gazelle, and civets into stockades or ring fences. These unfortunate animals would have been slaughtered by the royal party using weaponry and trained cheetahs. A painting depicting this style of hunting was sold by Sotheby’s in June 2012, an illustration from the Hamir Hath: Ala-uddin and Mahima Hunting, Punjab Hills, circa 1790 – see end note to view online.

The Mughal Emperor Akbar (15561605) held grandiose qamargah spectacles. An album leaf from the

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seclusion in the Mughal court and Akbarnama, in the V&A Museum’s therefore painters would not have collection, shows an antelope being depicted them other than in the rare skinned whole and with a hooded and stylised examples of portraiture, cheetah about to be unleashed. This or as courtesans and dancing girls. image is in the online collections of the Despite the fact that women of the V&A (see end note for information). royal harem had both access to royal Contemporaneous Mughal hunting manuscripts and were commissioning scenes from this period capture the patrons of the arts in their own right. blood lust of these hunts – though Mughal miniatures tended to rarely show women’s participation. We portray ‘male’ spaces, narrating court know that elite women of the Timurid scenes and political life. By contrast, (1370-1507) and Mughal (1525-1805) women as decorous subjects in dynasties hunted on horseback like their noble menfolk and were ‘feminine’ spaces such as a garden terrace, or the object of the male gaze enthusiastic hunters.

Dr Soma Mukerjee, a scholar of – as in erotic harem images, or as subjects in religious stories.

Persian languages and medieval Indian Whilst respectable Mughal history, tells us that Nur Jahan (15771645) accompanied her husband, women lived in the harem, or zenana, secluded from all but their closest Emperor Jehangir on several hunts and male relatives, this does not mean was a skilled markswoman. She once they lived sheltered lives. Many of shot four tigers with six shots and was the women in the imperial household, rewarded for her prowess with a gift of such as Nur Jahan, amassed great a pair of diamond bracelets worth 100,000 rupees. What is fascinating about this is that she is said to have become a good shot in order to compete for the emperor’s affections against a rival wife – Jagat Gosain (a Hindu princess and mother of the Emperor Shah Jahan). Dr Mukerjee comments in her book, Royal Mughal Ladies and Their Contributions (New Delhi, 2001), ‘Once it seems, both these ladies accompanied Jehangir on a hunting expedition where they were confronted by a lion. Jagat Gosain acted swiftly and fired a shot killing the lion.

Emperor Jehangir praised Jagat Gosain greatly and found Nur Jahan to be a coward. Thereafter Nur Jahan developed her skill in shooting’.

Royal women lived in strict veiled

Women’s role as a huntress is portrayed in a number of Indian miniatures

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personal wealth and enjoyed the same leisure activities as their male relatives – such as smoking, gambling, and hunting. As is endearingly illustrated in an early 18th century album cover, from the Royal Collection Trust, which was shown in the exhibition Eastern Encounters, last displayed at The Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh in January 2021. A description of the cover notes, ‘The painted leather cover portrays Baz Bahadur and Rani Rupmati, hunting blackbuck with bows and arrows on horseback.

Baz Bahadur (Brave Falcon) was the Muslim Sultan of Malwa in Central India, defeated by Emperor Akbar’s forces in 1561. Rani Rupmati, a Hindu Rajput princess, was his beautiful and talented wife who committed suicide rather than marrying Akbar’s general after he stormed Baz Bahadur’s palace at Mandu. On the left is a seated woman wearing a plumed turban shooting blackbuck with a matchlock.

Ladies Shooting from a Pavilion, circa 1810, Kota School, Rajasthan, ink, colour and gold on paper, sheet with border 38.1 x 31.1 cm.

Purchase from the JH Wade Fund, Cleveland Museum of Art

Indian Painting 15 She is Chand Bibi, India’s famous warrior queen. Both of their tales were popular themes of poetry and song in Hindustan in the 17th and 18th centuries and equally became favourite subjects for painters.

Perhaps more intriguing than the main characters of this scene are the incidental details depicting women riding on horseback, fishing, roasting food and casually smoking hookahs.’.

Women start to make an appearance in hunting scenes from the early 1700s with notable examples from the Deccan region of India. These exquisite examples are all the more interesting given that the royal hunt was a symbol of male rule at the Mughal and Rajput courts. Historically, many Mughal and Rajput nobleman had been stationed in the Deccan on campaigns to help extend Mughal conquest over the region. These nobles would rarely have spent time at court and lived instead in vast military camps with their own retinue of artists and tradesmen. Such an environment spawned a unique blending of Mughal, Rajput and Deccani painting styles and subjects – as with the iconic image of Chand Bibi – India’s ‘Warrior Queen’ equivalent to the British Celtic Boudica – who is commonly painted seated astride a horse hawking or hunting. Chand Bibi successfully defended Ahmednagar fort with her army against Emperor Akbar’s forces in 1595. She was tragically murdered by her own troops after rumours spread that she was about to sue for peace with the Mughals.

While she died in tragic circumstances, you could say that there was justice for her in the end for it is said that when the Mughals finally took Ahmednagar one of their first acts was to hang her assassins.

The tribal hunt has a long standing tradition in India and, over the course of the 18th century, paintings start to emerge of the tribal female huntress, a tradition dating back to pre-historic times, as can be seen in the 10,000 year old rock paintings at Bhimbetka, in Madhya Pradesh, and later celebrated in the form of religious deities such as the goddess Durga – the supreme huntress – portrayed on her tiger mount slaying her ‘demon’ prey’. Whereas queens hunted tiger and panther for sport or status, tribal women hunted large mammals in order to protect life and property. Some of the most vivid descriptions come from British colonial accounts of tribal methods of hunting that confirm that tribal women hunted barasingha (deer) and tendwa (panther). In one example, a tribal woman snared a panther by starting a fire outside its cave.

A unique tribal hunt that celebrates women’s role as a huntress is the jani shirkar festival (hunting by women), which is held every 12 years in Jharkand, eastern India, although in present times the women hunt for less endangered prey such as goats and hens. In this festival, women dress up in male clothing, as an image shows of ‘Bhil’ Huntresses on the way to the Deccan. Bhil is an umbrella term used in reference to tribal peoples in the North India.

In Rajasthan, the small princely court of Kota is world famous for its paintings of rich and flamboyant hunting scenes set in the rocky and somewhat wooded forests of the region located in the south of the state. This style begins to flourish under the dynamism of Durjan Sal (1724-56) and it reached its artistic heights under Umed Singh (17611819) with parallels being drawn between Kota at this period and with the French painter Henri Rousseau’s (1844-1910) later tiger jungle scenes – and a final flourish under Ram

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Singh II (1808-1866).

In Volume 3 of his Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han (1829), British Political agent, and oriental scholar Lt Colonel James Tod (1782-1835) – an employee of the East India Company – describes Mahrao Durjan Sal as a valiant prince and expert rider, who as an avid devotee of tiger and lion hunting, built numerous hunting lodges and towers, shirkaragah, across his kingdom. Durjan Sal was notable for bringing along his royal ladies on hunting expeditions, and Tod wryly notes that these ‘Amazonian ladies’ were taught to use the matchlock gun and seated on terraced roofs of the hunting lodges from where they could be very much part of the event, as seen in these two 19th-century examples, the first from the Cleveland Museum of Art and the second example, in private collection, showing the queens poised to shoot a lion that is attacking a buffalo. The River Chambal provides the backdrop as does Kota fort in the distance.

This special genre of ‘ladies who hunt’ paintings show us the status and capabilities of women in India and their ability to move with power and agency in their own worlds, however restricted that world may have been.

In an interesting twist, it was British colonial women with their feminine trait as the gentler sex who would start to question the excesses of hunting. Fanny Eden, sister of Lord Auckland, Governor General of India (1836-42), in Tiger, Durbars and Kings: Fanny Eden’s Indian Journals (1837-88), published by John Murray in 1988, noted how men murdered wild animals without remorse and in an account of the trampling of a wild boar she observes, that ‘it seemed to be such a fine strong beast so exactly fitted to its own jungles – I do not see our right to take out our love of destruction there’.

Although rare, it is possible to glimpse the life and stories of strong women throughout India’s history through these miniature paintings that show them as equal to their menfolk in the field.

Bhils Hunting

by Night, circa 1760, Faizallah of the Awadh School, opaque pigments with gold on paper, with blue and buff outer border, 25.7 x 16.8 cm.

Museum purchase, Hugh Leander Adams, Mary Trumbull Adams and Hugh Trumbull Adams, Princeton Art Fund, Princeton University Art Museum

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16 From the Archives

Crowned male figure, gesturing or dancing, 1850–1925, Burma, painted wood, lacquer, gilding, and mirrored glass.

Gift of the Donald W Perez Family in memory of Margaret and George W Haldeman

The holy monk Phra Malai visiting hell, circa 1850-1900, Thailand, lacquered and gilded copper alloy with pigment, gift of Dr Sarah Bekker.

All images © Asian Art Museum

Headdress for the hero Rama in the Ramayana dance-drama, circa 1950-60, Thailand, gilded lacquer, wood, silver, glass, rawhide, and paper.

Gift from Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s Southeast Asian Art Collection

Mythical bird-man, approx 1775-1850.

Central Thailand, wood with remnants of lacquer, gilding and mirrored glass inlay.

Gift from Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s Southeast Asian Art Collection

Emerald Cities Arts of Siam & Burma 1775-1950

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his exhibition of Southeast Asian art was held at the Asian Art Museum (AAM) in San Francisco and mainly featured the donation from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

Doris Duke (1912-1993) was the only child of James Buchanan Duke, a founder of the American Tobacco Company and Duke Energy Company, and a benefactor of Duke University in his native North Carolina. Throughout her life, Doris Duke enthusiastically pursued her varied interests – from the time of her honeymoon tour to India, Thailand, Indonesia, and other Asian countries in 1935, Doris Duke was fascinated with the region’s cultures.

In later decades, she gathered countless antiques and artworks on her worldwide excursions and assembled a notable collection of Islamic and Southeast Asian Art. After Doris Duke’s death in 1993, her Southeast Asian Art Collection became the responsibility of the trustees of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (DDCF).

The AAM learned of the collection through its late board chair Jack Bogart and, through Mr Bogart’s efforts, the AAM was fortunate to be the recipient of a substantial part of this important collection after the trustees of the DDCF approved a plan to donate the collection to appropriate museums in 2002.

The AAM and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore received the largest donations from the collection – 167 and 150 objects, respectively. In total, the foundation donated more than 700 objects to approximately 20 asian art | summer 2021 |

Scenes from the Burmese version of the Ramayana, circa 1850-1900, Burma, cotton, wool, silk, and sequins, museum purchase

museums across the US and abroad.

To see Islamic works from the Duke Collection, The Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design is housed in a former home of Doris Duke near Diamond Head just outside Honolulu, Hawaii. It is now owned and operated as a public museum of the arts and cultures of the Islamic world by the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art. By 2002, the museum’s holdings in Southeast Asian art had increased dramatically from a donation from the Duke collection, which included sculptures, paintings, and decorative arts. Before the Duke collections were distributed, the AAM Southeast Asian Art Collection already included more than 400 objects, as well as

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1,800 other items in their holdings.

Doris Duke’s Southeast Asian collection was originally housed at Duke Farms (Doris Duke’s principal residence in Hillsborough, New Jersey), where for many years it remained largely unknown both to the public and specialists. In 2009, over two thirds of the artworks exhibited in Emerald Cities was from this donation. Previously, the museum had also spent more than five years completing an extensive conservation project to preserve and stabilise these artworks and the exhibition was the first opportunity for their public showing.

More than 140 artworks on show were drawn exclusively from the museum’s collection, which had asianartnewspaper |

Manuscript with scenes of combat from the Thai version of the Ramayana, circa 1800-1840, Central Thailand, pigments and gold on paper. Gift from Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s Southeast Asian Art Collection

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become one of the largest and most important collections of 19thcentury Siamese and Burmese art outside of Southeast Asia due to the addition of the Duke collection.

Objects on view included ornately carved furniture, highly decorated miniature shrines, gilded statues, illustrated manuscripts, paintings, as well as mirrored and bejewelled ritual objects.

The artworks were presented by region and divided into three distinctive geographical areas: Burma, the highlands of Northern Thailand and Shan State, Burma and Central Thailand. Within each geographical region, artworks are further categorised by their functions: Religious Art, including Buddhist manuscripts, sculpture, and objects for ritual use such as offering containers and ceremonial begging bowls; Mythology, including theatrical masks, costumes and puppets used for the dramatic productions of the epic Ramayana; and Luxury Goods, including gold and silver vessels, furniture, and textiles.

Artworks in Hambrecht Gallery had a focus on Burmese art. One of the highlights was a lacquered and gilded Buddhist manuscript depicting scenes from the life of the Buddha.

This type of manuscript was often given to a monastery at the time when a family relation was preparing to enter the monkhood. Up to the present day, it is customary for young men to become monks for as little as three months in order to bestow merit on their families. The manuscript on view depicts the scene of Prince Siddhartha

From the Archives 17

Miniature temple, circa 1850-1900, Northern Thailand, lacquer, pigmented natural resin, paint, and gilding on wood. Gift from Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s Southeast Asian Art Collection

(the Buddha to be) leaving his family to embark on his spiritual pursuit, a seemingly appropriate subject for the circumstances. The scene is placed in what would have been a contemporary Burmese royal court, with added embellishments that give it a fantastical quality.

The Hambrecht Gallery also featured artworks from Northern Thailand and Shan State, Burma.

One of the first of these is a lavishly decorated miniature shrine almost two metres high from the highlands of Northern Thailand. Made of lacquered and gilded wood, the shrine is adorned with mirrored glass and topped by several tiers of tapering roofs with prickly finials and a tiered parasol finial. Its structure is based on architectural forms of the time and demonstrates the tendency towards the ornate.

Seated and crowned bejewelled Buddha, 1895, Burma, possibly Shan States, gilded dry lacquer with mirrored glass.

Gift of Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s Southeast Asian Art Collection

Lidded offering container, 1800-1925, Thailand, lacquered wood with mother-of-pearl.

Gift from Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s Southeast Asian Art Collection

King Nimi is carried through the heavens on a divine chariot, a scene from the Nimi Jataka, circa 18751925, Thailand, paint on cloth.

Gift of Dr Sarah Bekker

the 1790s, the first monarch of the new kingdom of Siam had hundreds of Buddha images from other parts of his realm brought to Wat Phra Chettuphon, a new temple built in Bangkok under his reign. To make the styles of the images uniform, he had them covered with layers of stucco coated in gilded lacquer. In the 1950s, when this style had gone out of fashion, the stucco was removed from these temple images and most fragments were presumably discarded. The stucco Buddha image in the exhibition is only one of two that is known to have survived.

In the same gallery was a complete set of 13 paintings – each reflecting one of the 13 chapters that recount the next-to-last story of the previous lives of the Buddha from the Jataka stories. This sacred story is often recited at religious festivals. In each

The exhibition continued with a section devoted to artworks solely from Central Thailand, which accounted for more than two thirds of the artworks on view in the exhibition, including a head of a Buddha image in stucco displayed alongside other Buddha images. In

painting a chapter of the sacred story is depicted in the middle of the composition with other narratives depicted along the edges. The stories often add soap operatic visual elements depicting everyday dramas that perhaps kept the story interesting and relevant to the audience. A complete set of all 13 paintings telling this story is extremely rare.

Having served its purpose, a set of such paintings, after a recitation at a festival, may have been put away with no provisions in place for their preservation, dispersed individually, or given away in smaller sets.

One of the highlights of the exhibition was a popular wedding gift that was often given by the royal Thai family – a gold bowl. The ornate example was presented to the daughter of Hamilton King, a US diplomat in Siam, by Rama V on the occasion of her wedding in 1921. The bowl was personally delivered by a Siamese envoy to the King to the family in the US. It is decorated with three alternating motifs: a mythical eagle with human attributes, stylised

foliage, and a celestial being with the hand gesture of adoration.

The final section included a display of shadow puppets used for the reenactment of the Ramayana epic, as well as headdresses worn by dancers portraying Rama and Sita in classical Siamese dance version. Other objects in the final display were wooden statues of mythical creatures that are half-bird, half human and inhabited an Eden-like forest in Buddha legend. Of these, the opulent and bejewelled head dresses particularly reinforce the sumptuous aesthetic found in artworks from Siam and Burma found in the 19th century.

This aesthetic, in different variations, was echoed throughout most of the artworks on view in Emerald Cities.

This expansive exhibition is still one of the most comprehensive to date on the arts of Southeast Asia.

• The exhibition ran from

23 October 2009 to 10 January 2010 at Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, asianart.org. A catalogue accompanied the exhibition.

Gold bowl with garudas and celestials, 1920–1921, Thailand, gold, gift of the family of Helen King Gethman

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Shaikh Zain ud-Din, Black-Hooded Oriole and Insect on Jackfruit Stump (detail), Calcutta, 1778, watercolour. Gift of Elizabeth and Willard Clark, Minneapolis Institute of Art

Shaikh Zain ud-Din, Black-Hooded Oriole and Insect on Jackfruit Stump (detail), Calcutta, 1778, watercolour. Gift of Elizabeth and Willard Clark, Minneapolis Institute of Art

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18 Exhibitions

Beyond the Sea Ancient Maps of Taiwan

Japan A History of Style

Map of Taiwan, Qianlong period, mid-18th century, ink and colour on paper, Qing dynasty, National Museum, Taipei

The Kingdom of Tungning was founded in Taiwan in 1662 by Ming loyalist Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong, 1624-1662), after he defeated the Dutch East India Company. During this period, the Qing government knew very little about this far-away place. The Taiwan Luetu (Sketch Map of Taiwan Prefecture), produced around 1666 in both the Manchu and Chinese languages and on display in this exhibition, only covers a few parts of what is today Tainan, which included Luermen Channel, Chikan Tower, and Chengtian Prefecture, and focuses on the Koxinga period’s military garrisons. However, by the end of the 17th century (mid-Kangxi reign), the situation had changed dramatically. The Kangxi Taiwan Yutu (Kangxi Taiwan Map), in the National Taiwan Museum collection, records the natural and cultural landscapes of western Taiwan at that

time from north to south. The depiction of indigenous peoples and their customs also indicates a fair understanding of Taiwan’s society, culture, and overall geography.

The Qianlong Emperor’s loosening of restrictions on immigration to Taiwan led to an influx of Han Chinese settlers onto the island. The Qianlong Taiwan Ditu (Qianlong Map of Taiwan), produced in the mid-18th century, shows more than 600 Han Chinese settlements and over 300 aboriginal ones, suggesting rapid population growth. The descriptions ‘in the mountains’ and ‘beyond the mountains’ that accompany the names of indigenous settlements suggest that the Han Chinese already had certain understanding of Taiwan’s eastern coast.

In 1368, envoys of the King of Hami (Kumul) travelled to the Ming capital (present-day Nanjing), bringing with them a tribute of a

large number of horses. How did the delegation make their way from their faraway kingdom, lying outside the frontier fortress at the western end of the Ming dynasty’s Great Wall, all the way to the Ming Empire’s capital in the southeast?

One map on display, the Nanjing Zhi Gansu Yipu Tu (Map of the Relays from Nanjing to Gansu), traces just this route – extending from the Ming capital all the way to the northwest and ending in Shazhou (today’s Dunhuang).

Another map, Sichuansheng Silu Guanyi Tu (Map of the Passes and Relays of the Four Routes in Sichuan Province), produced in the Ming dynasty, depicts four routes starting from the regional military commission of Chengdu and extending north and south, thus constituting an extensive regional network of passes and relays.

• Until 22 July, National Palace Museum, Taiwan, npm.gov.tw

A Vast Emporium The discovery of sea routes that directly connected Europe to the vast maritime world of Asia enabled the creation of a global trading community. For the first time, Europeans had direct access to a wealth of luxurious commodities such as Chinese porcelain, vivid Indian textiles, and Japanese lacquerware. At cosmopolitan ports in Asia, artists responded to this new age of artistic and cultural exchange and created hybrid works of art using regional techniques. These new wares were exported around the world creating the first globally recognised styles. Inversely, the influx of exotic wares adapted to suit the aristocracy of Europe inspired imitation and innovation

by European artists, who adapted oriental motifs for local demand and export to Asia.

• From 1 May, A Vast Emporium: Artistic Exchange and Innovation in a Global Age, at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, agsa.sa.gov.au asian art | summer 2021 |

Plate with sailing ship, 1700-20, Jingdezhen, Jiangxi, porcelain, China, underglaze blue decoration, diam. 27.2 cm.

Elizabeth and Tom Hunter Fund, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

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Style, a deceptively simple term. At the same time, it both promises and delivers an almost endless landscape of creative genius. As a generally accepted popular use, it can be used in reference to just about anyone or anything. At its most correct use as an academic term, however, it refers to those creations, regardless of medium or date, that are firmly identified with a specific artist or culture. In the case before us now, that culture is Japan’s. Even so, the Met’s own use of ‘style’, as in ‘style of…’, in many titles, seems contradictory.

The question here that the exhibition both asks and answers is ‘What makes a Japanese object Japanese in the first place?’ Both are accomplished by this complete and comprehensive exhibition that has been the work of John T Carpenter, Mary Griggs Burke Curator of Japanese Art; and the curators Monika Bincsik and Aaron Rio, who deserve kudos for their careful selection of illustrative works of art from the Met’s incomparable Japanese Collection, from Japan’s earliest days to the present.

Japan has a history of cultural imports beginning around the 6th century, and even before in some cases. Its earliest religious buildings and sculpture are either completely Korean, such as the National Treasure Kudara Kannon, the only Paekche/Baekche sculpture in existence, as well as a few extant temples in Nara designed and built

by Koreans. It was almost overnight, for example, that Korean depictions of the Buddha of the Future, Maitreya, became identifiably Japanese. Nothing imported or adopted from abroad remained foreign for long after the arts became exposed to the revolutionary changes of the Japanese creative genius. Examples are known from early periods, such as how the Southern Song West Lake School of misty landscapes later evolved in Japan as Muromachi Suiboku.

This display, the first of four rotations, concentrate on the sacred arts of Buddhism, Shinto, and Zen to explore the diversity of their arts, as well as the lush dialogue within Zen, the foundation of Kano, and the contributions of Rinpa and Maruyama-Shijo. With the exception of the Zen calligraphy, the exhibition comprises works that are unquestionably Japanese in origin, the earliest being a pair of male and female Shinto kami, both depicted in the typical guise of aristocrats.

The majority of the remainder of the exhibition is paintings, some in screen format. The earliest painted works here are Zen calligraphic scrolls by Muso Soseki (1275-1351), Sesson Yubai (1290-1346), and Zekkai Chushin (1336-1405). These are followed by a hierarchical depiction of the Shakyamuni Triad of the Sixteen Protectors of the Great Wisdom Sutra, Unsurprisingly, it is Nanbokucho in date, a time during the 14th century when Japan was ripped asunder by horrific warfare. At that time, the two most frequent subjects of paintings were of the Buddha, usually as Amida Raigo (for the solace of the populace) or Fudo Myoo (as protector of the warrior caste.)

Included in this historical exploration of paintings are some

Asian Art Newspaper

Double-cut (nijuu-giri) flower container, named ‘Cool Summer Morning’ (Shinryoo)

by Koogetsu Sõgan (1574-1643).

Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

examples dating from the 16th to 20th century, six painted works from five different traditions: Soga, Kano, Rinpa, Shijo-Maruyama and shin-hanga. The earliest of these is a six-fold screen of hunting falcons by Soga Chokuan, circa 1596-1606, a subject beloved of the Momoyama daimyo, followed by a screen of Chinese sages by Kano Sanraku and a pair of painted hinoki (cedar) panels by Ogata Korin. These stand strongly in comparison to a Shijo-Maruyama screen by Sakai Hoitsu, whose works, like others in that school, tend to be mechanically excellent, unashamedly twodimensional, and completely bloodless.

The most recent painted work is a pair of six-fold screens by Kishi Chikudo (1826-1912), datable to 1892, which depicts a tiger, tigress, and cub. It could be viewed as a subliminal bit of subconscious propaganda by depicting the head of the family as wise and powerful, much in the same was the Meiji Emperor was depicted as the wise and powerful father of the country.

Finally, the exhibition concludes with a finely plaited hanging flower basket, hanaire, by Tanabe Chikuunsai I (1877-1937), and a wonderful, contemporary (2019) glass sculpture by Ikuta Niyoko that bears a strikingly similar shape to a murmuration of starlings.

Martin Barnes Lorber

• Until 8 March, 2022, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, metmuseum.org.

Exhibitions 19

All by Myself Japanese Creative Prints The long tradition of exquisite printmaking in Japan is due, in part, to the division of labour, having different specialists handle each stage of the printmaking process: designing, carving and printing.

However, in the early 20th century certain print artists began doing everything themselves, producing what were known as sosaku-hanga, or creative prints, which are highly individual expressions in both style and subject matter. This exhibition presents examples from several artists working within the sosakuhanga movement, including a recent acquisition and loans from a private collection.

• Until 19 September, Dayton Art Institute daytonartinstitute.org

Asian Art Online Only 14 June 2021

Cats (1953) by Saito Kiyoshi (1907-1997), woodblock print, ink and colour on paper, number 40/50. Private Collection, Dayton Art Institute

Splendid Visions Gifts from the Robert and Amy Clague Collections This exhibition features examples of Chinese cloisonné and bronzes, Chinese textiles, Hindu and Buddhist manuscript covers, and more donated to Phoenix Art Museum by the Clague family.

Throughout its 60-year history, the museum has developed a distinctive collection of Asian art through gifts from local collectors, whose legacy of generosity benefits visitors of all ages and will do so for generations to come. This spirit of philanthropy characterised Robert and Amy Clague, both of whom passed away in 1995 and 2020, respectively.

Although their individual interests

Ogival throne cover with decoration of a dragon, Ming dynasty, silk kesi tapestry, dyed polychrome silk yarns, gold-wrapped yarns and peacockfeather-filament-embellished yarns

varied, the Clagues each assembled collections that earned international acclaim for the museum. Robert Clague collected Chinese cloisonné and, later, Chinese bronzes, while Amy Clague collected Chinese and Southeast Asian textiles, as well as Hindu and Buddhist manuscript covers. Through their unique interests, the Clagues inspired each other to seek works of art that depict life experiences different from their own, with compositions rich in cultural meaning and religious symbolism.

• Until 24 April, 2022, Phoenix Museum of Art, phxart.org

Opium, Silk, and the Missionaries in China The exhibition and project Opium, Silk and the Missionaries in China explores one of the largely forgotten histories between Britain and China in the 19th century. Drawing on several collections, the chosen objects and artefacts are used to examine the history of the Opium Wars through botanical material and works, tools, historical artefacts about silk, plus material related to missionary work.

Also included are intercultural shared experiences in China recorded by British Missionaries during the period.

Various sections give an insight into the history of opium in China, the story of the opium poppy species of flowering plant in the family Papaveraceae, and the colonial drug trade of the East India Company. It also looks at the possessions of war, including the territory of Hong Kong taken from China as the fruits from the Opium Wars, a result of the treaties of Nanking, Tientsin, and the Convention of Peking.

Objects involved in the silk trade with China and the growth of British merchant’s trade across East Asia are also examined.

Finally, there is the history of The Mission from London to Canton and the relationship between Missionaries in China and ‘opium’, told through the story of Gladys Alyward rejected by the China Inland Mission for her lack of education, who went to China as an independent missionary, who paid her own way to China in the 1900s, and became a national hero in China and Britain.

• Until 26 June, Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London, soas.ac.uk

NEXT AUCTION:

Works of Art, Antiquities 秋季拍卖： 艺术品和古董

June 21, 2021

ONLINE AUCTION

A figurally carved Chinese ivory box, 19th century

www.hermann-historica.com Hermann Historica GmbH Bretonischer Ring 3 ❘ 85630 Grasbrunn / Munich ❘ Germany

Gladys Aylward in Yangchen, Shansi Province, May 1936, from SOAS Special Collections AsianArtNewsp_1/6p_hoch_4c_O88.indd 1

11.05.21 10:27 asian art | summer 2021

20 Exhibitions

Border Crossing North and Korean Art from the Sigg Collection

Underworld (2021) by Ali Banisadr, oil on linen, 66 x 88 inches. Courtesy of the artist

Beautiful Lies Upon the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante, Italy has embarked on a year of celebrations commemorating the medieval poet. Among the numerous events taking place throughout the year, some involve contemporary artists whose work is in dialogue with Dante’s oeuvre.

Such is the case in Florence, where Dante was born, with the Stefano Bardini Museum and the Palazzo Vecchio Museum featuring the work of Ali Banisadr (b 1976, Iran). Dante’s most famous book, The Divine Comedy, takes the reader on a journey through hell, the purgatory,

and finally, paradise. Deeply introspective, the book reflects Dante’s aspirations, anxieties and dreams as he goes through these three worlds.

Ali Banisadr’s work has always been in dialogue with other artistic forms, be this painting, film, music or literature that nurture the artist’s paintings. Dante has been a figure Banisadr has studied closely, especially in the way to process what one has experienced, seen and learned. Having lived through the Iran/Iraq War as a child before migrating to the United States where he

now lives, the notion of a living hell is still present.

The violence of human behaviour, sounds of explosions are issues Banisadr addresses in his pieces, presenting a broad view of the world we are living in. As Dante recounts through his ‘Divine Comedy’, Ali Banisadr presents on canvas his own introspective journey, a journey that eventually lies ahead of all human beings.

The Sigg collection remains one of the largest and most comprehensive when it comes to contemporary art form China. Several years ago, in 2012, Uli Sigg decided to donate the majority of his pieces to the M+ museum in Hong Kong, which is scheduled to open later this year. Sigg (b 1946, Switzerland) started his collection in the 1980s when he was appointed by the Swiss elevator company Schindler to set up a joint venture in China. He continued expanding his collection throughout the decade and even more so in the 1990s, when he became the Swiss ambassador to China from 1995 to 1998. What is less well-known is that at the same time, he also served as ambassador to North Korea, providing him with unique access to the country and its artworks.

The present exhibition brings together approximately 75 pieces from the Sigg collection, covering a time span of 40 years (1970s-2010s) of the Korean peninsula. It features works from North Korea, from South Korean artists, as well as Chinese artists living close to the North Korean border – or part of the Korean minority in China.

Since the end of the Korean war in 1953, art has been serving a different purpose in the North and in the South: whereas in the North, art is primarily a controlled means of communication for the regime to glorify its leaders and its system, the South has nurtured a diverse and multi-faceted art scene with many of their artists being part of the most established in the world. The curator of the exhibition has deliberately avoided separating the works

of art by nation, in favour of bringing them together around a specific theme of motif. Besides the pieces drawn from the Sigg collection, the exhibition also features the North Korean posters from the collection of Katharina Zellweger, who was based in Pyongyang between 2006 and 2019, coordinating humanitarian aid in the country. Generally hand painted, the posters then serve as basis for the printed posters, stamp or postcards.

Beyond its historic and aesthetic interest, this exhibition accurately establishes how art reflects its time, and how the impact of the political system is essential in the creative process.

Olivia Sand

• Until 5 September,

Kunstmuseum, Bern, kunstmuseumbern.ch

Olivia Sand

• Until 29 August at Stefano Bardini Museum and Palazzo Vecchio Museum, Florence

ART AND DIPLOMACY An exhibition of part of the Japanese Collections at the Château de Fontainebleau, Art and Diplomacy, features the public diplomatic gifts offered by the penultimate Shogun Tokugawa Iemochi to Napoleon III during two Japanese embassies to France in 1862 and 1864. Once admired and on public display, the collection was subsequently stored and largely forgotten in the chateau’s reserves.

The exhibition now brings back to life these special gifts, given at a time when Japan was collection of works of special status, situated at a period of transition when Japan was taking its first steps on the international stage during the period of transformation in the Meiji era.

The embassies’ aim was to probe the intentions of European governments and attempt to renegotiate the so-called unequal treaties which had just been signed following the forced opening of Japan by Commodore Perry in 1854. Japan, by their involvement in the Sinicized world, had a great experience of the art of gift giving. It was therefore a carefully considered choice to send paintings, lacquer objects, and other objets d’art to France.

The Japanese diplomatic archives record the care that went into the choice of works and the manufacturing process, for example, the official painters of the Shogunate made the kakemono and the screen – and how they were adapted for Western taste.

The Missiles, 1994-2004, by Pak Yong Chol, oil on canvas, 152 x 272 cm.

Photo: Sigg Collection, Mauensee

Etel Adnan Impossible Homecoming This exhibition brings together 60 years of work by artist and poet Etel Adnan, whose works reflect the rich identity of the artist – Adnan was born in Beirut in 1925 to a multilingual, multi-faith, and multi-cultural family and region. Never indifferent to the wars and political-social upheavals that beset her life, the artist uses writing and painting to create her works.

This retrospective includes oil paintings, drawings, prints, ceramics, carpets, leporellos, and a film.

The daughter of a Smyrnan Greek mother and an Ottoman officer born in Damascus, both of whom were isolated from their congregations because of their marriage, Etel Adnan has produced works that bear the traces of her roots. Etel Adnan’s identity has been shaped by migration, exile, and asylum and the exhibition has taken a holistic approach towards her work.

After receiving a

• 4 June to 19 September, Chateau de Fontainbleau, France, chateaudefontainebleau.fr.

A catalogue is available in French.

Scroll painting, end of the Edo period, circa 1850-1858, Château de Fontainebleau.

Photo: ©RMN-Grand Palais / Gérard Blot

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The artist Etel Adnan at work

scholarship, Adnan emigrated to Paris to study philosophy, and from there later went to the US to continue her education at Berkeley and Harvard. She returned to Beirut in 1972, to ‘an exile from an exile’, in her own words. War was looming on the horizon of the country she had left decades earlier.

She left Beirut and returned again into voluntary exile to California. Since then, she has continued living between

US, Lebanon, and France.

Adnan began painting much later in life, after a career in creative writing and literature, and only started to exhibit paintings for the first time in art centres and galleries around San Francisco. After a while, she became interested in leporellos (accordion-folded artist’s books) and tapestry weaving. She met Syrian artist Simone Fattal in Beirut while working at the newspaper Al Safa, who later became her partner. Adnan started to share a studio with Fattal, and after a short while opened her first solo exhibition in Lebanon at Dar al-Fan, Beirut. This retrospective in Istanbul brings all the points of her varied life into focus in one exhibition.

• Until 8 August, Pera Museum, Istanbul, peramuseum.org. You can take a 3-D virtual tour of the exhibition on the museum’s website. Catalogue available.

Gallery Shows 21

AI WEIWEI Marble, Porcelain, Lego Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (b 1957) is one of the very few artists in the world who needs no introduction: a multifaceted artist working with installation, performance, photography, sculpture, video and film, he has over time taken his art practice far beyond the art world. He is also an activist embracing issues dealing with the human condition on a global scale.

Throughout his career, he has been a strong advocate of the freedom of speech and human rights, first towards the Chinese government, and lately towards European countries and especially in their unresolved refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. The later issue also led him to complete the film The Rest, before releasing his most recent feature film, Coronation, about the Covid-19 pandemic in China.

In this exhibition in Paris, Ai Weiwei is presenting recent pieces made in marble,

I Can’t Breathe on Green (2019), Lego bricks, 231 x 154 cm, Ai Weiwei.

Courtesy Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin l Paris l London Photo: Studio Ai Weiwei

porcelain and Lego. As in some of his earlier work, he relies on noble and refined materials like marble or porcelain to make witty comments on our society: for example, he completed a marble version of toilet paper, emblematic of the absurdity of human behaviour at the beginning of the pandemic.

When working in porcelain, Ai Weiwei continues to build on his lasting relationship with craftsmen in Jingdezhen, creating pieces

with a quality reminiscent of the one of the Ming dynasty.

Even his use of a profane medium such as Lego is based on perfection, echoing the visual aspect of mosaics : his delicate rendition of the Saudi flag references the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi with the telling title I can’t breathe on Green.

Strikingly, over his career that now spans close to four decades, Ai Wei Wei never fails to present pieces that not only serve as a vehicle for commenting on our condition, but that are perfectly executed, fulfilling high aesthetic standards.

As a citizen of the world, Ai Weiwei continues in his quest to raise awareness towards people’s basic rights which more than ever today are threatened in many parts of the world.

Fake Gate No 2 (2019) © Yin Xiuzhen, courtesy Pace Gallery

with Chinese history and tradition, porcelain has been the focus of Yin’s practice in recent years, and its materiality has served as the impetus for significant variability in her sculptural

iNTErPrETiNg AN ANCiENT BUDDhiST SiTE iN TELANgANA edited by Naman P. Ahuja

The first comprehensive volume on this Indian monastic complex in collaboration with the Department of Heritage Telangana

Olivia Sand

• Until 7 August, Galerie Max

Hetzler, Paris, maxhetzler.com

Yin XIuzhen Along the Way Along the Way, a solo exhibition in New York dedicated to Beijing- based artist Yin Xiuzhen, who has been a pioneer of Chinese performance and installation art since the early 1990s and is one of the most foremost artists working in the region today. Yin’s works operate as rich repositories of cultural memory, capturing the scale of change that occurred in China in the late 20th century, and have been exhibited internationally for decades. Yin’s work is a commentary on Chinese society, reflecting her own lived experiences while weaving together additional personal narratives into a collective history.

The show also debuts new porcelain works by the artist created in the past three years that reflect her ongoing experimentation with the material. Closely associated

PhANigiri

work during this time.

The exhibition highlights Yin’s masterful exploration of the interplay between globalisation and local tradition, as well as the interpenetration of personal history and collective experience, through a number of sculptures and installations reflecting the artist’s deft and wellrecognised sculptural integration of disparate everyday items. Featuring over 20 works, including the debut of new porcelain pieces alongside large-scale sculptural installations, the exhibition showcases the core themes and artistic language of Yin’s creative output through a spotlight on several key materials prevalent throughout her practice, including porcelain, cement, and fabric.

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• Until 26 June, Pace, New York, pace.com

JAPANESE BLUE The latest show from this gallery presents the works of six contemporary Japanese artists as they explore the use of blue pigment. This is the first group exhibition and contemplates the marriage of a colour and a medium – blue pigment and ceramic, which holds a strong connection and represents both Japanese and Portuguese art. Featuring the work of artists Hashimoto Machiko, Hoshino Satoru, Kishi Eiko, Kojima Osamu, Kosaka Mio, and Nakashima Harumi. Thia is just the second exhibition organised by the Sokyo Gallery, which was founded in Lisbon in 2020 as a homage to the lively cultural exchange that took place between Japan and Portugal dating back to the 16th century.

• Until 12 June, Sokyo Gallery, Lisbon, sokyolisbon.com

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Purple (2019) by Kohima Osamu

asian art | summer 2021

22 Auctions / Fairs

AUCTION REVIEWS

FAIRS

BONHAMS NYC Collection of Late Dr Teruo Hirose

Parcours des Mondes Paris, 7 to 12 September

New York, 12 May, 2021

A collection of 11 early works previously unseen by Yayoi Kusama (b 1929) from the late Dr Teruo Hirose Collection was 100% sold. The top lot was Untitled (1965), which sold for US$4.5 million.

The Collection of the late Dr Teruo Hirose comprised three paintings and eight works on paper, gifted by Yayoi Kusuma herself to Dr Hirose, her lifelong friend and doctor whom she consulted in her early years in New York in the 1960s, when she was a struggling young artist in need of medical aid.

Untitled (1965) by Yayoi Kusama, oil on canvas, sold for US$4,590,313, Bonhams New York Flower Petal (1963) by Yayoi Kusama, sold for US$412,813, Bonhams New York Hudson River (1960) by Yayoi Kusama, sold for US$3,990,313, Bonhams New York

BONHAMS LONDON Roger Keverne Ltd Moving On, Part 1 12 May, 2021, London

The sale was the first of two dedicated single-owner Chinese art auctions offering the entire contents of the long-established London Chinese art dealership Roger Keverne Ltd. The second and final sale will be held in London on 7 June 2021 – with all lots to be offered at no reserve. The first sale was 100% sold.

The H Collection Chinese Furniture, Archaic Bronzes, and Japanese Art 13 May, London

Over 80 pieces from this European collection were included in the sale, comprising an important group of classical huanghuali furniture, early archaic bronze ritual vessels, ceramics, jades and scholar’s works of art, as well as Japanese screens, works of art, arms and armour. The core part of the collection revolved around Chinese classical huanghuali, furniture dating from the Ming dynasty in the 1550s to the Qing dynasty in the 18th century.

BONHAMS HK Southeast Asian Modern and Contemporary Art 22 April, 2021, Hong Kong

The highlight of this sale was a new-to-market oil on canvas by the Indonesia-based Belgian painter Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur (1880-1958).

Two Women Arranging Flowers in the Interior is an intimate depiction of Le Mayeur’s home in Bali – a traditional Joglo house which in his own words served as his ‘little paradise’. Other highlights included a terracotta sculpture by Vu Cao Dam (19082000), Deux Jeunes Femmes, a rarity, as the artist was normally known for his paintings. The other Vietnamese work in the top three lots was an oil on silk laid board, entitled La Couture, by Le Pho (1907-2001).

SOTHEBYS HK Beyond Legends: Modern Evening Art Sale

Large polychromed limestone figure of a Luohan, 9th/10th century, sold for £137,750 (est £30-50,000), Bonhams London Underglaze blue and yellow-ground dragon and ruyi bowl, Kangxi six-character mark and of the period (1662-1722), sold for £137,750 (est £30-50,000), Bonhams London Twelve-leaf Coromandel lacquer ‘Palace Ladies’ screen, Kangxi period, sold for £106,509 (est£8-12,000), Bonhams London

Rectangular day bed, ta, huanghuali, circa 1550-1600, 213 x 63 x 54 cm, sold for £862,750, Bonhams London Low-back continuous yoke armchair, nanguanmaoyi, huanghuali, 17th century, 93 x 56.3 x 45.3 cm, sold for £598,750, Bonhams London Greenstone-inset, huanghuali, square incense stand, changfangxiangji, 17th 18th century, China, sold for £187,750, over four times its estimate, Bonhams London

Two Women Arranging Flowers in The Interior by Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur, circa 1950, oil on canvas in its original Balinese frame, 75.5 x 91.5 cm, sold for HK$14,052, Bonhams Hong Kong Deux Jeunes Femmes by Vu Cao Dam, sculpture, terracotta, sold for HK$1,127,500, Bonhams Hong Kong La Couture (1965) by Le Pho, oil on silk laid board, 73 x 50 cm, sold for HK$1,127,500, Bonhams Hong Kong

The Madame Dothi Dumonteil Collection 18 April, 2021, Hong Kong

This single-owner sale of four works asian art | summer 2021 |

Icons: Masterpieces from Across Time and Space 18 April, 2021, Hong Kong

13.02.62 (1962) by Zao Wou-Ki, oil on canvas, 129.5 x 161.5 cm, tripled estimate to sell for HK$229,568,000 /US$29,540,810 (est HK$100-150 million), which achieved a world auction record for the artist, Sotheby’s Hong Kong Harmonie Hivernale (1986) by Chu Teh-Chun,oil on canvas, triptych), 193 x 384.7 cm, sold for HK$229,568,000/US$29.54 million (est HK$80-120 million), nearly tripling its estimate and gaining a world auction record for the artist, Sotheby’s Hong Kong

18 April, Hong Kong

The evening sale brought together a selection of works from such masters as Zao Wou-Ki, Sanyu, Wu Guangzhong, Liu Kuo-Sung, Hsiao China, and Chu Teh-Chun. One of the top lot of the sale was Zao Wou-Ki’s 1962 work completed on the artist’s birthday. Another highlight was an oil on canvas by Chu Teh-Chun dating to 1986, which was the artist’s first triptych depicting a snow scene to appear at auction. Both works gained world auction records for the artists.

from the Golden Age of Vietnamese art was offered within the Modern Art Evening sale and was 100% sold with the top lot, Portrait of Mademoiselle Phuong by Mai Trung Thu, gaining an auction record for Vietnamese art.

The collection featured works by pioneering artists who established a new canon of Vietnamese art, elevating traditional crafts and mediums to modern forms of expression.

This specially themed sale offered works spanning a thousand years of history, mixed with Asian and Western works of art. The three Asian works (out of five lots offered), including a 1950s work by Sanyu, a self-portrait by Zhang Daqian, and a large wood sculpture of Avalokiteshvara from the Song dynasty (960-1279). The other works offered were works by Picasso and Alberto Giacometti.

Portrait of Mademoiselle Phuong (1930) by Mai Trung Thu, oil on canvas, 135.5 x 80 cm, sold for HK$24,375,000 /US$3,136,575 (est HK$7.5-9.3 million), creating a world auction record for a Vietnamese artwork, Sotheby’s Hong Kong Large wood sculpture of Avalokiteshvara, Song dynasty, height 137.2 cm, sold for HK$45,728 ,000 (est HK$30-50 million), Sotheby’s Hong Kong Nu avec un Pekinois by Sanyu, circa 1950s, oil on Masonite, 84 x 122 cm, sold for HK$230 million/US$ 29.5 million (est HK$48-60 million), Sotheby’s Hong Kong Self-portrait with a Tibetan Mastiff by Zhang Daqian, splashed ink and colour on gold paper, framed, 176 x 96 cm, sold for HK$57,218,000 (est HK$48-60 million), Sotheby’s Hong Kong

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This year, Parcours des Mondes celebrates its 20th anniversary in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighbourhood, which has been home to the event since its beginnings. To date, 40 French and international gallerists have confirmed that they will be participating. The occasion gives an opportunity to all collectors and enthusiasts from the world over to gather in this multiplevenue event’s galleries on the rue de Seine, rue des Beaux-Arts, rue Visconti, rue Guénégaud, and a few other small streets in this area.

Exhibitors showing Asian art include Galerie Alain Bovis, who will be exhibiting pygmy fabrics and masks from Nepal. Pacassio Manfredi has an exhibition entitled Nias and Friends, showing art from Indonesia and the Philippines. Dalton Somaré are presenting a selection of Asian art, a highlight being a Khmer-period garuda mask. And Christophe Hioco will offer their usual selection of Asian art with a highlight this year being a Pala-period model of a stupa from Bihar, North India.

• More information on parcours-des-mondes.com

Votive stupa, black stone 11/11th century, Pala period, Bihar, North India, height 34 cm, Galerie Christophe Hioco

HALI FAIR

Online, London, from 23 to 27 June

HALI Fair Online is a new virtual event focused exclusively on antique rugs and textiles from around the globe, with a fair, exhibitions and events including lectures, interviews, and presentations. Connect virtually with 30 of the world’s most prestigious specialist dealers to discover and acquire a wide range of rugs and textiles from around the world dating from antiquity to the 20th century. Exhibitors will be available online during the five-day event, to discuss the works on show with visitors to their virtual stands via a live-chat messaging feed or visitors’ preferred channels.

Costume and textiles from Africa, South America, Indonesia, Europe and Asia will be offered by Francesca Galloway, Andres Moraga, Joss Graham, Sarajo, Thomas Murray, Marilyn Garrow, Donald Harper, Rudolf Smend, Markus Voigt, Menzel Galerie Nordafrika and Michael Woerner Oriental Art. Lectures, conversations and presentations of rugs and textiles will be broadcast daily and available on-demand for the duration of the online event. Tim Stanley, senior curator for the Middle Eastern collections at London’s V&A, presents a lecture on the royal custom of awarding robes of honour (khel‘at) to members of the court or to distinguished visitors – an ancient tradition in Iran recorded at least as far back as the Sasanian period (224-651 ) – and shows two robes from the museum’s current exhibition, Epic Iran (until 12 September).

• Registration is open now via hali-fair.com

Chamba Rumal embroidery depicting Krishna, late 19th century, Himachal-Pradesh, India, Joss Graham

Tampan Pasisir with a large ship and figures (detail), 19th century, Lampung South Sumatra, Michael Woerner

Islamic Arts 23

Islamic Arts Diary The immortal voice of Lebanon, Fairuz, on show in Paris

Note Worthies

Yahya al-Wasiti’s 13th-century manuscript painting of a Baghdad library before the Mongols came to town

Designed by Foster + Partners, the new House of Wisdom in Sharjah is as heroically international as the first version, more than a thousand years ago

by Lucien de Guise

Moving House

The Gulf states have moved on from importing works of art to burnish their cultural credentials. The Golden Age of Islamic history was not only about the material, although this did impress visitors throughout medieval times. It was ideas that really set the Abbasid caliphate apart. Above all there was the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikmah), the pride of Baghdad.

There is a revisionist viewpoint that no such ‘house’ existed. Some scholars insist that the capital of the

Stretching the Silk Road

The ‘Divas’ exhibition in Paris, like so many others, comes with a Covid-19 disclaimer that does not apply to the project below from the Aga Khan Foundation UK. London’s museums have started to reopen but this space in King’s Cross has been open for much longer as it’s outdoors. This is unusual for a photo exhibition, made possible with weatherproofing against the legendary damp of an English spring.

Equally legendary is the subject matter of The Silk Road: A Living History. Consisting of around 100 photos, this is a visual approach to the place, people and cultures of 17 countries along the ancient Silk Road. It is a journey of 40,000 kilometres that manages to squeeze in the UK at one end, with the more predictable Beijing at the other.

The exhibition documents a journey following the near-mythical trade route undertaken by photographer Christopher WiltonSteer in 2019. It was not only goods that travelled these routes; it was also conduit for knowledge, religions and people. Gunpowder, the magnetic compass, the printing press and advanced mathematics all came to Europe from China via the Islamic world. Buddhism, Christianity and Islam each found new converts in the lands that opened up to the East and West. These exchanges had a profound impact on the empires and civilisations through which traders passed, giving political, religious and cultural shape to different regions.

Islamic world had a collection of libraries and a strong inclination towards learning. They don’t doubt that Abbasid rulers took an interest in all forms of knowledge, especially science, but there are few sources to confirm the concept of a House of Wisdom with sultans gladly debating the finer points of academic erudition with the thinkers who undoubtedly gravitated towards Baghdad from the 9th century onwards.

As there are no physical remains of the Bayt al-Hikmah left in Baghdad – which was destroyed by the Mongols in 1258 – the emirate

of Sharjah has started again in the UAE. Using the same name as a millennium ago, there is a new House of Wisdom. This time it is unquestionably a single building that combines a library and cultural centre. We also know the name of the architectural practice that put up this new beacon of learning: it’s the UK-based firm of Foster + Partners.

The contents are less certain. There are many digital facilities along with the modern equivalent of the old courtly salons, now re-labelled as ‘Meeting Pods’.

What there is not much of is a collection of objets d’art, not that the

By the late 16th century, the Silk Road had lost its prominence to new maritime trade routes, but the legacy of interconnectivity and exchange endured. The display aims to celebrate the diversity of cultural expressions found along the route.

The Silk Road was neither a road nor a single route. This was a sprawling network of trader arteries that covered thousands of miles across the continent of Eurasia.

Indirectly, they connected China with Europe. The exhibition shows how historical practices, rituals and customs live on today, and also reveal some of the connections between what appear at first glance to be very different cultures. It also seeks to engender interest and understanding between distant cultures and challenge perceptions of less well-known and barely understood parts of the world.

Photographs from Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan,

India, China and elsewhere are all part of the show. Additionally, the exhibition is intended to raise awareness of the Aga Khan Development Network’s contributions to improving the quality of life across social, economic and cultural spheres in Central and South Asia as well as the Middle East.

The Silk Road today is being reimagined on an unprecedented scale. Although not universally popular, China’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ is making Eurasia the heart of the largest and most expensive infrastructure project in history. If it is ever completed, a massive network of roads, railways, pipelines and ports could connect more than half of the world’s population and radically alter the flow of global trade. The vision is very much bigger than anything imagined by those Silk Road traders on their ad-hoc journeys in centuries past.

The glories of the Silk Road: A Living History, photographs by Christopher Wilton-Steer, on display amid the open space of King’s Cross, London

original House of Wisdom was about showcasing the visual arts.

The new version will have travelling exhibitions instead. As Sharjah has long been one of the prime movers of culture in the Arab world, these shows are certain to be wideranging.

There will also surely be a marvellous collection of books (Sharjah was named World Book Capital in 2019). Already installed is something called the ‘Espresso Book Machine’, which prints and binds books on demand. Most innovative is a scheme that has the international public donating money for books that have been requested by students in far-off Iraq. Their educational resources recently went through depredations similar to the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols.

They will surely need a subscription to the Asian Art Newspaper too!

For a different view of mainly Muslim culture, the Institut du Monde Arabe has a remarkable offering aimed at lovers of music, cinema and poster art.

Divas: From Oum Kalthoum to Dalida is a homage to the female Arab stars of the 20th century. More than just the two women in the title of the show, it covers names as luminous as Warda al-Djazaïria, Asmahan, Laila Mourad, Samia Gamal and, of course, Fairuz.

This is an exploration of how they changed the world around them as powerful women adored by different Arab societies in the post-war period.

From Cairo to Beirut and Paris, they were the embodiment of a sparkling era in which women came to the fore.

Through these divas we can understand the story of Arab women and the birth of feminism in the midst of patriarchal societies. They were important figures in PanArabism and the fight for independence and what came afterwards. Told in four acts, it starts with avant-garde feminists in the cosmopolitan Cairo of the 1920s and ends with current leaders in their creative fields explaining the influence of earlier generations. Although Shirin Neshat is from the Iranian rather than the Arab world, she has not been left out. Her contribution is immediate and very relevant: she made a film in 2017 called Looking for Oum Kulthum.

• Divas: From Oum Kalthoum to Dalida at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris.

Until 26 September

Victorian Values

Just about the furthest point from the Gulf’s new centrality to the Muslim world is Australia. Although there is only one museum of Islamic culture in that vast continent of a country, the Islamic Museum of Australia is making up for it with a strong programme of exhibitions and activities. Inclusion is an essential theme, as demonstrated in ‘Missing Voices’, which presents the untold testimonies of more than 50 Muslims in the southern state of Victoria. The result is a combination of photographs, paintings, video interviews and what the IMA calls ‘musings’. Much of it revolves around tolerance, resilience and the unavoidable shadow of Islamophobia.

There is candour and humour on display, along with fascinating accounts of life for minorities within a nation that is not widely understood outside the Asia-Pacific region. Amid the many works are eight portraits by an Ethiopian-born, Melbourne-based artist who unfortunately died before the exhibition was opened. Tamirat Gebremariam focused on subjects who had often experienced misfortunes. The same is true for Ahmed Ibrahim, also based in Melbourne. This photographer has captured sitters whose stories are often surprising and always worth telling. My favourite was the account of the distant past by a woman called Ayesha: ‘My great-grandfather was the first Muslim in Western Australia. He was a merchant. And my greatgrandmother was the first woman from the Subcontinent to travel to Perth…

My great-grandfather came here in the 1860s. The White Australia Policy was in place. My great-grandmother wore a burqa. The local newspaper announced

Ayesha (2021) by Ahmed Ibrahim, photographic print, 60cm x 40cm

her arrival with the headline “Human shuttlecock arrives in Australia”. My grandfather was accused of having a slave woman and was taken to court. Most Australians did not know about Islam then. But someone who did explained that these were ‘Mohammadens’, and that their women were covered. So the case against him was dismissed.’

• Missing Voices at the Islamic Museum of Australia, Melbourne, until 16 July 202, and online at islamicmuseum.org.au

Barry (2020) by Tamir Gebremariam, 60cm x 40cm

asian art | summer 2021

ASIAN ART IN COLOGNE

A pair of huanghuali wood horse shoe back chairs

China, 18th/19th century. Private collection, Hesse, Germany. H 100 cm

184 5

AUCTIONS 24 June: China, Tibet / Nepal, India, Southeast Asia 25 June: Japan T +49-221-92 57 29-37— asian@lempertz.com